It Is Not Good for Man to be Alone
The Lord uttered these words in Genesis 2.18. The next step in the Creation story is the creation of the woman to be with the man. God made us as social creatures. We need time with other people, and we don’t do well in isolation. We all learned this in the “recent unpleasantness.”
An article at Our World in Data discusses how we use our time. An interesting aspect of that is the section called “Time use from the perspective of the life cycle.” From the article:
When we’re young — particularly in our teens — we spend a lot of our time with friends, parents, siblings, and extended family.
As we enter our 20s, time with friends, siblings, and parents starts to drop off quickly. Instead, we start spending an increasing amount of time with partners and children. The chart shows an average across Americans, so for those that have children the time spent with children is even higher, since the average is pulled down by those without children.
Many people make this the focus of their lives, everything revolves around the kids and their activities. There are also friendships, but the central focus is the family.
As the chart shows, this continues throughout our 30s, 40s, and 50s — over this period of their life, Americans spend much of their time with partners, children, and, unsurprisingly, co-workers.
But relationships drop off as we approach retirement ages. The kids have grown up, gone to college, started families of their own. Maybe they live many miles away, and the relationship is still there, but it costs money to visit and as their own kids are now their focus, your time with your own children necessarily drops. The friends you form during your family years have less in common, perhaps, you once socialized around the activities of your kids. And work relationships drop off. People begin to retire, move away, and outside of work, what do you talk about anyway?
Eventually, even marriage relationships end, as one spouse precedes the other in death. Unfortunately in our society, many marriage or “marriage-like” relationships end anyway, in the bitter throes of disputes, divorces and separations.
As we age, whatever our circumstances, we increasingly find that we spend our time alone.
It is not good for man to be alone.
What should we think about this?
If we are Christians, there is another kind of human relationship we should all engage in: our local church. In our local church, we have many friends of all ages with whom we regularly interact. We have many people with whom we can meet, go out for coffee, gather with in various kinds of social activities, and even more importantly, to serve. As we get involved in church, we have people we can serve! We get involved in their lives. We join Bible studies. We encourage others to come along. We get them involved in interacting with one another. We form strong bonds.
Yes, from time to time some will move away, either across the country or to heaven. Our own children often move away to serve somewhere else. But we always have others to serve, and our lives can be full of the lives of others.
No, it is not good for man to be alone, but Christians should find that they are never alone.
There is another thing to think about this. There are a lot of lonely people in our community. If we reach out to them, we can fill a void in their lives. God created us to interact with others, but some have failed to invest in the deep relationships they can have through God in the church. They are really alone. Let’s find them. It is never too late for them to find out what they are missing.
It is not good for man to be alone, and there is no need for any man to be alone, as long as there are Christians who will invite the lonely to come to church, and to Christ.
Don Johnson is the pastor of Grace Baptist Church of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada.