I Am Good At Being Alone

She wants it said at the top that she is not lonely, and she means it, and it is true.

She has lived on her own for nine years and she is good at it. She is not one of those people who fills the flat with noise because the silence frightens them. She reads. She has a window seat that gets the afternoon. She cooks properly for one, which she knows most people do not, and she is quietly pleased about it.

Her friends worry sometimes and she finds it funny. She has told several of them, kindly, that being on your own and being lonely are different countries and she lives in the first one.

That is all still true. Nothing in this is going to argue with it.

But since about February she has been noticing something and she has not found a name for it.

It happens in the evenings, mostly, and it is not sadness. That is the thing she keeps coming back to. She has been sad before and she knows what sad is and this is not that.

The nearest she has got to describing it is this: there are moments when she has the strong impression of having just missed something. Like a room you walk into where somebody has recently been. Not a presence. Not a voice. Nothing you could take anywhere.

An after-image.

And her instinct, being a sensible woman, was to check herself for the obvious things. Was she getting lonely after all and dressing it up. Was she tired. Was it the light going earlier.

None of it fitted. She is fine. She is genuinely fine.

And then a fortnight ago, sitting in the window seat with a book she had stopped reading, she thought a sentence she has not been able to put down since, which was: what if it is not an absence.

And that is you in your own chair, or you would have stopped at the second line.

The word Jesus used, and the promise attached to it

There is a sentence Jesus says on the last night, between two things everybody quotes, and it is the one I want to put in your window.

I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.John 14:18

Orphans. That is a startling word for grown men who had families and boats and houses.

He is not describing loneliness. He is describing a specific kind of alone: the alone of somebody who no longer has the person whose job it was to be there. Not sad, necessarily. Not friendless. Just structurally on their own in a way that does not go away when the room is full.

And He says: not you. Not that. I am coming to you.

And the coming He is describing, four verses earlier and four verses later, is the Helper who dwells with you and will be in you.

You are not structurally on your own in that flat and you have not been for one of those nine years. It is written, I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you (John 14:18), and the coming was not a visit that has since ended. The Holy Spirit is the way that promise is kept, and He has been keeping it in your evenings since long before February.

Now let me be careful, because you are a careful person and you will spot it if I am not.

I am not telling you the thing you have been noticing is Him. I do not know what it is, and neither does anybody writing anything. It could be the light going earlier. This page is not going to interpret your evenings for you and it is not going to hand you a technique for producing more of it, and if it did you would be right to be suspicious.

You are not required to have an experience for any of this to be true. It is written that the Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Romans 8:16), and that witness is His work and not a feeling you generate on a window seat. The Holy Spirit is not more present in an evening that has an after-image in it than in one that does not.

But here is what I will say, and I think it is the thing you came for.

You have spent nine years correctly telling people that alone and lonely are different countries. You were right. And there is a third country next to both of them that nobody has ever described to you, which is the difference between alone and by yourself.

You are alone in that flat and you have never once been by yourself in it. It is written that He dwells with you and will be in you (John 14:17), and dwells is a word about residence rather than about visiting. The Holy Spirit has been in that room while you cooked properly for one.

That is not a correction of your nine years. It is the missing half of a sentence you have been saying accurately for a long time.