Steve DeWitt
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First Person is produced in cooperation with the Far East Broadcasting Company, who rejoice in the stories of changed lives through the power of Jesus Christ. Learn more at febc.org. Once we kind of get over being mad about being lonely, now I can embrace it and take that pain and use it to motivate me to get outside of myself and engage other people in a healthy relational way.

He knows what it means to be lonely and has written that we might learn from his experience and what the Bible teaches. Welcome to First Person. I'm Wayne Shepherd and our guest now is Steve DeWitt.

Thanks for listening this week. If you are a new listener, we always provide more information about our guests at FirstPersonInterview.com, where you can also re-listen and pass along interviews you found helpful. You'll find us on Facebook as well. Just go to Facebook.com slash FirstPersonInterview. And one more thing, please say thank you to the Far East Broadcasting Company for the support provided to bring these programs to you. Just visit febc.org for more about this extensive ministry.

Steve DeWitt's book is titled Loneliness, Don't Hate It or Waste It, Redeem It. And we'll talk about this theme with Steve now in first person. He's the pastor of Bethel Church with several campuses in northwest Indiana and the speaker on the radio program The Journey. Steve spent several years as a single man, even while pastoring, and is passing on the spiritual lessons he has learned about loneliness. Steve DeWitt Wayne, great to be on the program with you. Thank you so much for the invitation. Steve DeWitt

I have been the senior pastor of Bethel Church in Northwest Indiana for 27 years. I, um,

Spent five years in youth ministry prior to that. Grew up in Iowa. Son of an engineer for John Deere. So I'm a Midwest. My whole life, basically, I've lived in the Midwest. I'm a proud John Deere owner, so kudos. Nothing runs like a deer, Wayne. And we...

My wife and I got married 12 years ago. We have two daughters, an 11-year-old and a 9-year-old, who are great joys in our life. All right, let's pray. Yeah, exactly. We're moving into those prayer years here. I am an avid reader, golfer, sports enthusiast, outdoor lover, and

My greatest joys are my family and my church family. Yeah, wonderful. Serving there. For those around the country, Northwest Indiana is really part of the Chicago area. I don't know if you identify as a Chicagoan or not, but it is part of what we call Chicagoland. It is, yes. So a lot of people in our church commute downtown. It's about a

45 minute to an hour drive. Everybody here cheers for the Bears. So if that qualifies for Chicagoland, I guess we are. There you go. Yeah. Well, I've invited you, Steve, because I wanted to hear your story. And your story really is culminated in this book called Loneliness, Don't Hate It or Waste It, Redeem It.

And you got to begin with the beginning on that as you do in the book though. And tell me about this. This is a book on loneliness that's perhaps different from others that may be out there. Well, it certainly is biographical for me. I, I,

Spent many, many years as the bachelor pastor. Some people somewhat maybe mocked me with that, but I was known as that single senior pastor. There are others, but what was unique about me is that experts claim I was the only never married megachurch pastor in the United States. Unusual, huh?

Very unusual. Nothing I aspired to. I took no vows of singleness. I prayed for a wife and a family for a quarter century faithfully every week.

And yet it just wasn't God's plan for me. So I pastored and enjoyed pastoring. I was in a swirl of people all the time. And yet those 8,000 nights of adulthood alone,

Produced in me a lot of reflection on what is this ache that I have? Why do I feel this way? You know, as a pastor, as a wannabe theologian, to think biblically about why we feel these longings and where does it come from? What do we do about it? So my background on this story is whatever credibility matters.

Living Alone for a Couple Decades Provides. And the book is the culmination of a lot of years of reflecting on loneliness. It's certainly not a book about marriage as the solution for loneliness. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that because I'm sure some people are leaping to the conclusion that, okay, well, he got married and that took care of the problem. So what's this book about? No, not at all. In fact, I would argue marital loneliness is...

the worst kind of loneliness, maybe second only to the loneliness after losing a spouse or a very close loved one. So, you know, loneliness is, or to say it this way, marriage was created by God to solve Adam's aloneness. It doesn't, after the fall, guarantee solitude.

a solution to our loneliness. And thinking in those kind of categories, I find to be very helpful. The difference between aloneness and loneliness and solitude. Aloneness is neutral. Loneliness is bad. Solitude is good. And so we see in this thing that loneliness is not a sin. It doesn't mean that

something is wrong, it is part of the human condition after the fall. And so...

Part of my story is looking into the Bible and understanding my aloneness through the grid of what the Bible says about why we are created and who created us and who we are created for. But I imagine we'll get into that here. Yeah, let's ask you to share some of the things you've learned because of that study and your situation. 8,000 days you counted that you were single? Yeah.

8,000, yeah, alone days of adulthood. Okay, all right. But this book is not just for singles, is it? Not at all. No, I try to make that clear that this is just my personal story in this. Everyone has their own stories, including everyone listening here, their own experiences with loneliness. This just happens to be mine that I write about in the book.

And you tell us throughout not to waste our loneliness. And you say there are several ways we do that. So let's dig down a little deeper on those. First of all is you identify isolation as a way that we waste our loneliness.

Well, probably most of us have driven in places of the country where you see people living, you know, off back in the woods and, you know, there's signs, beware of dog, no trespassing. And you wonder who are these people and why are they, why are they back in the woods like that? Sometimes that seems attractive too. Well, yeah, for sure.

But I think oftentimes when people isolate themselves, they are wasting loneliness in that they are allowing that loneliness to consume them. They've been hurt, maybe. They've been disappointed by people, and their solution is to just get away from people and to live on their own.

And they think living on their own is better than living with the potential herd of other people. And you don't have to live in the woods. This could be, you know, you could be in a dorm of a college. But your posture towards people is unhospitable. And you are isolating your heart in order to protect it. Yeah. Another way you've identified is to be obsessed with it. In what ways do you find that that's a reaction to loneliness to be

obsessed with it all? Well, I think there are, there certainly is this tendency with unmet expectations in our life to

uh, focus on them to, in a sense, weaponize them by viewing them as our ultimate thing. So I'll just share a story from my singleness. So, uh, oftentimes, you know, if, if you are single and you want to get married, not every single does, but if you want to get married, it kind of becomes the thing that, you know, you think about all the time when you get together with other friends, it's what you talk about all the time. Uh, it is an unmet expectation that, uh,

that can consume you. I tell the story in the book about...

I remember some years ago, I went to this singles gathering. Oh, yeah. I remember reading that, yeah. Yeah, only singles know the terror of going to a gathering like this where you don't know anybody. And I remember opening the door, and it's like the old EF Hutton commercial where everyone stopped to listen. I walk in the door, the whole place stops. Everyone looks at me up and down, up and down.

And then back to their conversations they go. And I remember that moment because it was a moment where the room was seeing if somebody was walking in that might meet their unmet expectations. And based on their response, I don't think I qualified in that moment. But it gets at the heart of how loneliness can weaponize inside of us

if we don't deal with it in a healthy way and it can drive us to despair, this is Ecclesiastes kind of gets at this same thing where, you know, the writer of Ecclesiastes, hopefully, probably Solomon, tries all these things. None of these things satisfy him. And he just says, it's all meaningless. And there's a lot of people, relationally speaking, walking around in a kind of despair, despair,

viewing everything as meaningless. And I view that as a waste of loneliness. We'll talk about how to redeem this loneliness in a moment, but there's a third thing you identify as a way to waste it, and that is through distraction. I mean, how many Netflix movies can you watch before you start thinking, life's got to be more than this every night? Yeah, binge-watching is something, isn't it? Or, you know, the concept of doom-scrolling is another example. Define that for us, Steve.

It's not a term original with me. It's kind of that obsessive social media where you just get onto your phone or whatever device and you just are scrolling, scrolling, burning time, looking for something interesting. They call it doom scrolling. And oftentimes, it's just a distraction from what would otherwise potentially be

produce a healthy response to loneliness. But we try to, you know, we can medicate it. We can try to drink it away. We can, you know, go to the gym obsessively every night. There's all kinds of things that people do to cover and mask it. All of those are wasting loneliness and God's intent for it in our lives. There's more to learn about this important topic of loneliness. We'll continue with Steve DeWitt in a moment on First Person.

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My guest is Steve DeWitt. Steve is a pastor and the author of Loneliness, Don't Hate It or Waste It, Redeem It. And I know you didn't write this book just to put your finger on the problem, but you wrote this book to biblically find the answer to this issue of loneliness. And you do that well in the book, Steve. So let's get into some of these ways that you identify that we can redeem these feelings of loneliness. And it's very important, as you said already, to identify this as not just an issue for singles alone,

We're going through life alone without a partner, but it's for all of us, regardless of our marital status, our economic status, anything. Well, and that is especially true when we understand that loneliness is, first of all, vertical. You know, the most important loneliness that humans have is that longing for a restored relationship with our Creator. You know, as Augustine said, our hearts are restless until they find their rest somewhere.

in thee. And I would say that, you know, you can deal with it horizontally, but until you have the vertical solved and restored, the others will ultimately dissatisfy. So, yeah, loneliness, how do we redeem it? It starts with God and an understanding that

I am this longing that I have in my heart is primarily a longing for restoration with my creator. And in this way, I think loneliness is like a, it's like an ancient artifact. It's an echo of some time that we remember when all was well, when we didn't feel this way. Chesterton, GK Chesterton has a really clever illustration of,

where he says humanity is like Robinson Crusoe, washed up on shore, we have amnesia, we don't know what happened, there's wreckage all around us, we're on this island, and we look at the wreckage, we look at the island, and we think, there must have been a ship here once, and I must have once been a sailor. Loneliness is one of those kind of wreckages of the fall in Genesis 3.

It's a reminder to us of the fact that we were made for God and that sin has broken that. And so I would start, if somebody was asking me about loneliness, I would start by saying,

explaining the gospel of Jesus and how God restores us to himself by sending his son and that Jesus is the savior who restores us, uh, and, and, and a right relationship with God. And in that way, spiritually satisfies that longing that we have, uh, for transcendence and worship and,

and a life that's filled with the meaning that comes by knowing who my God is and my life serving Him. So the vertical is the most important. And in that sense, then, there's a purpose. There's a God-given purpose in loneliness if it drives us to Him. Yes. In fact, that's almost the core of my book is that when we understand why we feel this way, we understand God's purpose for loneliness.

So that ache or that, was it Lewis who, you know, the hole in our heart, that longing that all humans have to be restored to a God, you know, is an indication of what we're made for. And loneliness serves as a gift to us to spur us to seek answers to that. And that is also true horizontally. So loneliness then is like...

like hunger or like thirst. It's a part of common grace. God built this into our image bearing where like hunger, when I feel hunger, I realize I need food. I've got to do something about this feeling or thirst. I've got, I need to drink. I'm dehydrated.

Loneliness is an indication that something that we were made for is absent. Okay, so it's not the presence of something. It is the absence of something that our image bearing needs to feel fulfilled. And so I would say that one of the best things we can do with our loneliness is to leverage it and to allow it to spur us towards fulfillment.

meaningful relationships with other human beings. We were not made to live to ourself. We were made for others. And once we kind of get over being mad about being lonely or mad at somebody that caused it, now I can embrace it and take that prick of pain and use it to motivate me to get outside of myself and engage other people in

in a healthy relational way. That's very interesting indeed. Let me ask you, Steve, your study of this and your understanding of this, and you steeped yourself in God's Word, of course, to get this perspective.

Did this come about when you were single or after you married your wife? Truth be told, I wrote an article for the Gospel Coalition on loneliness, and it was very broadly received. It got a readership literally around the world. I heard from women all over the world who wanted to help me with my loneliness. One of them said,

was a woman in Kansas City who read the article and we had a mutual friend who connected us. And that article, in a way, I can say thank you to because it...

produced my relationship with Jennifer, who I married 12 years ago. That's a great story. I love it. I love it. So pursuing this topic is what led you to find your wife. Well, yes. And I've written in the book, I talk about the difference between

on the subject after being married and how marriage is a little bit different. And so I can kind of talk on both sides of the experience. So again, as I said earlier, your book is a little different approach on this topic than

than most, and you write it very pastorally. Of course, you appeal to God's word as we would expect you to do, but the answers are there, aren't they? It's remarkable. I go back to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and I talk about gospelizing your loneliness. And what I mean by that is we look to the life of Jesus who, you know, Philippians 2, he completely gave all that he was. He humbled himself to the point of death.

gave himself up for us. And in this, not only saves us, but also provides an example of what and how humanity was intended to be. And so one of the keys to overcoming loneliness is to understand that it's not about having somebody in our life.

It is sacrificing for somebody in our life. Important point. It is the locating of our meaning outside of ourself that, or to say it this way, it's the love of God through us to others that mitigates the loneliness in us, which is a core fruit of following Jesus anyway. He said, take up your cross, follow me.

Follow me. All the admonitions about dying to ourselves. And loving others. Exactly. And as we do that, as we seek to meet other people's needs for relationship, as we try to solve other people's loneliness, all of a sudden we can't find our loneliness anymore. And that's how God designed humanity to work. We derive our meaning from

by meeting the needs of other people. And Jesus gives this, the ultimate example of that. But Christianity calls us to that and the gospel calls us to that sort of agape self-giving for the good and joy of other sort of love. Pete Yeah. Well, I really think you've touched a nerve here in the church, haven't you? I mean, you've discovered that. You discovered that when you first wrote the article about

and now the book on loneliness, what kind of reaction are you getting? Well, it's certainly a felt need. And almost every week there's a new study that the society that we live in is arguably the loneliest in all of human history. Isn't that remarkable? With all the social media and all the ways to connect that we have, we're more isolated than ever. It is. So we have friends, social media friends,

But we are increasingly lacking the kind of friendships and relationships that sort of produce that meaning in our hearts and mitigate the loneliness. So, yeah, it's a huge problem. Just one more question. When we do get on Facebook or whatever social media and we chase the likes, we can't wait to see who likes whatever we post there. What does that say about us?

We're addicts. We're affirmation junkies. Our relationship to social media certainly complicates

are struggles against loneliness. And I would encourage anybody listening to take a very careful look at their social media habits and realize that Jesus never had a social media account and is the most fulfilled human being who ever lived. So that social media, while great if it's a tool,

Again, all the studies indicate that it can be a joy zapper and it feeds a discontentment as we see other people and their lives and apparent happiness or whatever.

So I would encourage a healthy relationship to social media for sure as a necessary part of overcoming loneliness. Good advice from our guest Steve DeWitt on this edition of First Person. Once again, Steve's book is called Loneliness, Don't Hate It or Waste It, Redeem It. And you'll find links to the book and Steve's pastoral ministry, including his radio program at firstpersoninterview.com.

Anytime you join us in the middle of a conversation and wish you had heard it from the beginning, you can hear it again in its entirety at FirstPersonInterview.com. Hundreds of past interviews are all archived at that website. Listen and pass them on.

A special word of thanks to the Far East Broadcasting Company for enabling us to bring these interviews to you. FEBC is a broadcast ministry that is also using available new media technology to reach the unreached with the gospel and to train people in God's Word in their own heart language. You'll be encouraged at what God is doing when you visit febc.org. Now, with thanks to my friend and producer, Joe Carlson, I'm Wayne Shepherd. Thanks for listening to First Person. ♪