I’m going to make a confession. My hope is that you will not see this confession as a sign of weakness, but instead as something that opens up an opportunity for change, like God helps us to see it. Before I make the confession, though, I want to tell a brief story. My friend and I were driving home one day, when I asked him what he thought was the worse type of pain: physical pain or emotional pain. Without hesitating, he answered that it was emotional pain. I think I agree with him. I’ve hurt myself pretty badly before, but there have been few times in my life that I have felt more helpless than when I have felt alone. I’m not alone in this. Some of the most brilliant minds in history have despaired at the deep isolation they have felt. Vincent Van Gogh observed that “One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it;” Thomas Wolfe lamented that “the whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness...is the central and inevitable