a word before we begin
There is an old saying, My Friend, that you have heard all your life and very likely repeated. A friend in need is a friend indeed. It has the worn, comfortable feel of a proverb, and we say it and nod and think we have understood it. But sit with it a moment, for there is a deeper word hiding inside the old one, and it is the whole burden of this little booklet. A friend in need is a friend in deed. The true friend is known not by what he says in the easy hours but by what he does in the hard ones. He is proven in the deed, or he is not proven at all.
And that, as we shall see, is precisely what the Scripture means by love. Not the warm feeling we have wrapped the word in, but a thing that acts, that moves a hand, that shows up and stays. So let me say plainly at the outset what this booklet will keep saying to the end: a friend in word only is no friend at all. Scripture will not let us keep the title without the deed. If you will call a man your brother, then be one to him, in the deed and not the saying only; and if you will not, then do him the small mercy of not pretending.
Let me be clear about my aim, so no one mistakes it. This is not a plan for fixing society. That was never the Christian’s charge, and I will not pretend it is; the world will not be mended by our scolding it, and we were not sent to save the culture but to be the people of God within it. Nor is it a manual on making friends, a set of tips and tricks for the lonely. It is something deeper and, I hope, more useful than either. It is a booklet about a thing God said before there was ever a single sin in all the world, and about what the whole earth is now proving true by its misery.
For God said, in a garden where everything else had just been called good, that one thing was not good. And the thing He named was that the man was alone. Hold that, for the whole book grows from it. The ache you feel for others was not put in you by your brokenness; it was put in you by your Maker, on purpose, before anything broke. You were built for one another. And we have forgotten it so thoroughly, and torn ourselves apart so completely, that governments now appoint ministers to study our loneliness like a plague. So come and see how we were made, and how we lost it, and where the ache is answered at last.
A friend in word only is no friend at all.
chapter one
it is not good
Everything in this booklet rests on one sentence, spoken by God in a world without a single flaw in it, and if you will see that sentence rightly you will never again think of your longing for others as a weakness to be ashamed of. So let us go all the way back to the beginning, to the garden, before the serpent, before the fall, before there was any such thing as sin or sorrow or death in all the earth.
Watch how the account moves. Through the whole of the first chapter of Genesis, a solemn refrain sounds again and again, like a bell rung over each day of making. And God saw that it was good. The light was good, the land and the seas were good, the green things and the swimming things and the flying things and the beasts of the field, all of them good, and when the man himself was made in the image of God, the verdict rose to its height: God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. Everything was good. Everything was very good. And then, into that perfect and unfallen world, falls the first shadow of a different word.
Mark it well, for it is the hinge of the whole matter. In a paradise where God had pronounced all things good, there was exactly one thing He called not good.
It is not good that the man should be alone. Sit with the wonder of that. This was not spoken over a fallen world, a world spoiled by sin and full of the loneliness that sin drags in after it. This was spoken over Eden, over a man who walked with God in the cool of the day and had never once known guilt or grief. The man was in perfect fellowship with his Maker, the highest and first of all relationships, complete in a way none of us has tasted since. And still God looked and said: it is not good that he is alone. The vertical bond, man with God, was there in its fullness. And God Himself declared that it was not enough by itself. The man was made for a horizontal bond as well, made for his own kind, and its absence was the one flaw in a flawless world.
The old Hebrew sharpens it further. The word rendered alone is lᵉbad, which means by oneself, in separation, cut off on one’s own. And the word good, sounding all through the first chapter, is tov, the word for what is right and whole and as it ought to be. Only here, over the solitary man, does the Scripture reach for lo-tov, not good, the single discordant note in the symphony of a perfect creation. God did not say it was dangerous for the man to be alone, or sad, or inconvenient. He said it was not good, not right, not whole, not as it ought to be. Aloneness was the one thing in Eden that fell short of the glory God intended.
God looked on a perfect world and found one thing wanting: the man was alone.
So understand what this means for you, down in the bone, before we go a single step further. The ache you feel when you are cut off from others is not a symptom of your sin. It is not a failure of your faith, as though a truly spiritual person would need no one but God. It is the echo of the design. God built you to need your own kind, and He built it into you in Eden, in a sinless world, on purpose. When you long for others, you are not being weak. You are being what He made you to be. And the whole tragedy of our age, as we shall see, is a world of people made for one another and starving alone, having been taught to call their starvation freedom.
the god who was never alone
is waiting for you
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sources & notes
- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2 (1840), pt. 2, ch. 2, “Of Individualism in Democratic Countries,” where Tocqueville calls individualism “a novel expression, to which a novel idea has given birth,” distinguishing it from mere selfishness (“egotism”).
- Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2 (1840), pt. 2, ch. 2: democracy “throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”
- Office of the U.S. Surgeon General, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023).
- Ibid.: the mortality impact of social disconnection is comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, with elevated risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, and premature death. See also Julianne Holt-Lunstad et al., “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review,” PLoS Medicine 7, no. 7 (2010), on which the comparison draws.
- The United Kingdom appointed the first Minister for Loneliness (Tracey Crouch) in 2018, following the report of the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness (2017).
- Japan appointed a Minister of Loneliness and Isolation (Tetsushi Sakamoto) in February 2021, amid rising pandemic-era suicide figures. The Japanese terms hikikomori (acute social withdrawal) and kodokushi (“lonely death”) name related phenomena.
- World Health Organization, Commission on Social Connection (established 2023); final report, From Loneliness to Social Connection: Charting a Path to Healthier Societies (WHO, 2025).
- Tristan Harris, former design ethicist at Google, describing the smartphone as “a slot machine” that exploits “intermittent variable rewards,” the same mechanism used in casino gaming, in the CBS 60 Minutes segment “Brain Hacking” (2017), and in his widely circulated 2013 internal presentation, “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention.”
- The Greek reciprocal pronoun allēlōn (“one another”) occurs about 100 times in the New Testament, of which roughly 59 are direct commands governing how believers treat one another, the most frequent being the command to love one another. See the standard tabulations of the “one another” passages.