A recent article in CBN quoted psychiatrist Daniel Amen saying, “Go back to church.”  He was responding to a recently-released Advisory from the U.S. Surgeon General which said loneliness is now a public health threat, making it as harmful as smoking and obesity to our nation. It seems that many Americans suffer with this painful secret.

The Advisory calls attention to “the public health crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of connection in our country.”  Surgeon General Vivek Murthy noted, “Loneliness increases the risk of physical ailments like heart disease, dementia, and stroke plus mental ones, including depression, anxiety and suicide.”  

As a mental health expert commenting on the Advisory, Dr. Amen stated, “I actually believe we’re on the beginning of a tidal wave of brain and mental health problems in young people, and it’s because we’re more disconnected than ever before, disconnected from our own families because when people are together their faces are buried in their gadgets.” So the psychiatrist says bluntly, “Go back to church.  Get involved.  Get involved with groups.  We have to go back.  And really, no better place to solve it than to church.”    

It is a well-known fact that loneliness is on the increase among men.  NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway has observed, “The most unstable nations in the world have one thing in common.  They have too many lonely, broken [men].”  Sociability has become a personal choice.  Younger men are not forming social bonds with real, live people.  “More U.S. men ages 18 to 34 are now living with their parents than with romantic partners.  Young men are not forming social bonds with real, live people, even when it comes to sexual relationships. 

Dr. Jeffery A. Hall has noted a steady decline in time spent talking with other people.  “There are increasing efforts to cut out other people in the name of removing toxicity.  And all these tendencies are pushed forward by frictionless technologies that remove social obligations to leave home, talk to others and engage in our community.”  Dr. Hall believes we can help reverse this with “our atrophied [relational] muscles, even if there is some short-term discomfort, and even if it means encountering people with disagreeable or uninteresting opinions.” 

Men in our culture need help in cultivating  relationships with real people. Sociability is vital since many younger men are simply dropping out, while older men push through with dysfunctional relationships.  What is needed are men who can model relationship building.   Young men who express a confident, selfless masculinity make not only better husbands and fathers, they “help check other men with negative character from becoming disproportionately fatherless young men who lapse into aggression or delinquency.

My advice:  1) Learn to live emotionally transparent with the Lord,  2) Confess your sinful relational tendencies, 3) Find a male soul friend who walks with God,  4) Join or form a group of men who talk openly about their relational difficulties.  In other words, go back to church.  Find, relate to, and share with other integrated (tough and tender) men.

David was an open, transparent, and vulnerable man.  He struggled mightily in his relationships.  “I am scorned by all my enemies and despised by my neighbors – even my friends are afraid to come near me” (Ps. 31:11 NLT).  But he prayed, “Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am in distress.  Tears blur my eyes. My body and soul are withering away (Ps. 31:9).  In Psalm 35 he acknowledges, “Malicious witnesses testify against me.  They accuse me of crimes I know nothing about (v. 11). Yet he prays, “How long, O Lord, will you look on and do nothing? Rescue me from their fierce attacks” (v. 17). 

“We are conscious these days of a deep-seated hunger, a secret need in our heart’s core, to be set free from sin, from the world, and from self-centeredness, and so to be reunited with our source.  We must only be earnest about it.  The power is close at hand.”  Wow!  The words written over 250 years ago seem to have a contemporary ring to the spiritual condition of our times.  

This is a quote from a short devotional book by Gerhard Tersteegen  (1697-1769), a spiritual writer and guide of the 18th century, entitled “The Quiet Way.” He was part of the renewal movement in Germany. “Germany, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was war-ridden and ,morally and spiritually impoverished.  A thirty-years war had cost her twelve million lives, forth-fifths of her population, and had left behind it a land of ravaged farmsteads, destroyed stock, famine, disease, bestiality and even cannibalism” (The Quiet Way -Intro).

In this environment Tersteegen’s advice was simple: “You are the child of God,  God’s nature is in you.  It has only over-clouded.  Withdraw from outward things.  Pray, and you will make contact again with God, the source of your being.  Forget yourself.  Forget your selfish desires.  Look to God.  Die to your own will, live for God’s will and you will know true life”  (The Quiet Way – Into.)

Tersteegen’s spiritual counsel can be helpful for us as we tread the spiritual landscape scattered with “mine fields” of distortion and outright unbelief.   The author’s audience was,  “harassed by war-time conditions, uncongenial companions, religious doubts, bad tempers, church divisions, uncontrollable impulses, and the will to do good which seems so often to be overruled by the bent to do evil” (The Quiet Way – Into). 

I discovered this small devotional guide in the 80’s.  I have read it many times in  my desire to be formed into the image of Christ.  I am definitely still a work in  progress.  But praise God, I have found help for the journey.  Tersteegen is one of those hidden spiritual guides of the past helping me to get both my head and heart integrated on the spiritual journey.  I want to share just a few gems from the first chapter, “God, our True Life,”  I must confess, I am able to integrate his insights more comprehensibly then in the 80’s.

The first gem: “Just stay where you are and unite yourselves with God as with something there already, that you do not need to seek!  For God is certainly with you and in you, although hidden by darkness.”  Colossians 3:3, “For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.”  For me this means – Through Jesus, God the Father has sent the Holy Spirit, the presence of the triune God into my heart (deepest center).  I do not have to go searching for the presence.  God is with me, but hidden.  Why?  So I don’t mess up the relationship.

The second gem:  “So do not go out so much into reflections.  Do not seek merely by reasoned, external methods to find sure foundations, but close your eyes like a child and confide yourself to the hidden Being who is so near to you inwardly.”  John 14:14, “My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”  For me this means – The triune God lives at the center.  Don’t try to figure it all out. Rest as a child in his bosom within

The Third gem:  “You don’t need to search for God; you have only to realize Him.” For me – It’s not doing or thinking more, but becoming aware.