Finding Joy.

In a world as ours, Independence is an easy disguise. Just go about your work with a little more headstrong focus, pack your days with one event after another, hold your head a little notch higher- and one earns the image one thinks one needs. But it is when the party ends, that often we find ourselves alone in a room strewn with dead streamers and empty beer bottles, and discover the horror of the empty room mirroring our inner state.

Loneliness, for some, can kill.

The clinical years of medical school are unpredictable and protean. The System bumps you from one department to the next, from one hospital to the next, and throws your social and academic life into a structured frenzy. The System leaves you with only a shadow of a timetable to adhere to, while the rest of your time is left for you to decide how to spend. It’s easy to spend time alone- for nobody, except The Examinations keeps track of your academic progress anyway. Because of my close-knit team, I’m hardly ever alone. Yet one day, as the Unpredictable System separated me from my team, I found myself alone and at once, strangely… lost. I was alone (not lonely yet at first) and yet as the day went by, without anyone to connect, or share thoughts with, I became increasingly aware of how interconnected our lives are with our friends, how tenuous and important the relationships in our lives can be, and most of all, my Vulnerability.

The day wore on, drearier by the minute. Busy doctors brushed me aside. By mid-afternoon, with nobody to share my weekend with, ask how I was nor anyone to listen to, a massive headache bore upon me. My girlfriends were in a different hospital- how I missed them. It surprised me, really. For in most times in the past, I’ve always been comfortable with alone-ness. Perhaps it is in times of busyness and pressure that our need for community becomes more apparent. Perhaps we are growing up and natural instinct deepens our need for community and companionship.

Friends. It is with them that we expose our vulnerabilities and so become stronger, humbler, and in a way, less vulnerable. And yet, take away one of them, a best friend or a parent or a sibling, and it is as if some malalignment of the stars took place and threw your universe into a temporary cosmic crisis.

Most people see my Independent side- the side comfortable with solitude- that could travel to Nepal alone for weeks and to attend art exhibitions alone. But there is a part of us where loneliness resides, and it is in that room, where dead streamers and broken beer bottles lay, that we must learn to clear up the mess, in strength and in joy.

Perhaps the difference between solitude and loneliness is the joy one can find in being alone, or rather, in realising that at no point are we truly ever alone. For God is with us, in us and by us.

It’s not easy to believe that always. Try being alone in a deserted rural village with a malarial outbreak without anti-malarials, suffering from diarrhoea and a desperate sense of homesickness- I didn’t do too well on that trip to India; or watching a thought-provoking play and admiring nature and then having nobody to share, enjoy it with; or rushing through the day running mindless errands- a friendly smile or a friendly joke does much to relieve the drabness. In times like these, only the mask of Independence covers the increasingly loneliness within, the coldness inside.

One becomes acutely aware of one’s neediness, one’s vulnerability.

Maybe that’s why so many of us choose to enter relationships so quickly. Perhaps why so many still do not find fulfillment in them.

But one thing I know for sure- that it is in the loneliness that we can choose to curse the mess in the room, or to sing a happy Snow-White tune while performing the most mundane of tasks. Tis the discipline of finding joy in God, in community and aloneness. Perhaps the difference between solitude and loneliness is simply the level of contentment we find with God in us. It is a place I am journeying to- I am not there yet. We are all human, with a hole within which yearns for companionship. Yet, it is God alone who can fill that hole just enough to tide us through difficult times, and God alone who leaves room just enough to keep us longing for a healthy sense of community.

For most things in life, we must be alone. We bathe and toilet alone, and no one but ourselves can go through this specific set of experiences ordained for us. When the party ends and the music stops, everyone has a different room to clean up by themselves. Missionaries often find themselves with a larger room to clean by themselves.

Perhaps we can take heart to know that God is strengthening our spirits and preparing our hearts, that this season of singleness has a purpose, that our loneliness can turn into contentment with solitude when we find our joy in Him. Perhaps we long too much for the constant companion we wish we had now to journey with us through our ups and downs, but we forget, that this season will end and that season will come. We forget, that we ought not to let our longings for what belongs to the future to slay our joy today.

But for now, let us live, in gratitude for our friends and joy in finding God in the empty room. It is through the valleys of loneliness where our contentment in Him is sweetest. It is not a waste of time, but a crucial process of moulding us into maturity.

So when the party ends and the music stops, I pray a happy Snow-White tune will sustain me, and my feet dance on my Father’s, as He guides me through clearing up the most appalling of messes, with joy, faith, trust and a happy, happy tune in my head.

A tune I can bring to the mission field, and into the hospital, everyday, wherever I go.

Laa.