Being together with other people is great. It is a great tool. It can be encouraging and refresh us from the fatigue of the world. But it is not always enough. Sometimes it is important to be alone.
In religion, the idea of togetherness is promoted so often that it actually becomes a detriment to individual growth. Too much connectivity drains people. It makes us tired of them to the point that we can actually start to dislike them.
I think this is partially due to social media, as I have mentioned before. When we are far too connected, we cannot appreciate the time we are together. And the more time we are artificially together through social media, the greater the possibility that we say something that angers someone else, or vice versa. Ask any married couple – being together 24/7 is not always an advantage.
There are many times when we need to take time to be on our own.
This is critical for us to recover our mental and emotional states. Being with other people can be exhausting, and it is useful and necessary to take a break from them if possible.
I’m certainly not suggesting a break from church. That is never a good idea. But I am suggesting that you minimize the time you spend with people periodically. This would be a great advantage for you if you were able to do so.
When reading the New Testament, you quickly see that even Christ took time away from people to rejuvenate Himself.
Perhaps we do not have the same need to escape that He did, since He spent the vast majority of His waking hours with other people, teaching and helping them.
But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.
Luke 5:16
After he had dismissed them, he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray. Later that night, he was there alone,
Matthew 14:23
One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God.
Luke 6:12
But even so, we still have the same need to get away from people, take a break from work, and refresh our minds and emotional states. We need to be comfortable with this because it is a critical tool for us. For some reason, religion has the idea that if we are apart for more than a millisecond, our faith will crumble. Not only is this untrue, but it is insulting. It suggests that we do not have enough faith or individual strength to stand on our own legs. This cannot and must not be the case. We must be willing to develop strength alone, split from the pack and be our own man.
There is no need to spend endless hours with others, especially when they are likely to be very poor influences, poor role models, and mediocre in life in general.
Many people have used their religion to justify a mediocre existence. They also try to justify a lackluster effort in their careers and personal development, all the while calling themselves “spiritual”.
If we spend time around too many mediocre people, we will become mediocre ourselves. And unfortunately, many people in the church have labeled their mediocrity “spiritualism”. I cannot say this enough if someone is living a mediocre life and justifying it by calling themselves “religious” he/she is a person you want to avoid at all costs.
We need to be comfortable being alone.
We need to learn to savor it and use it to strengthen us. You cannot always rely on others to be the strength for us. At some point, we have to learn how to stand on our own feet. Your peers may not want you to learn how to stand on your own feet because then they will have to do the same. And standing with their own faith is something that takes work, tenacity, and willingness to fail. How many Christians have that? How many Christians are successful? Not enough to justify modeling their behavior in your own life.
If you model the actions of a failure, you will become a failure. If you model the actions of a masculine success, that s what you will become. You need to take advantage of good influences and good role models while avoiding the incredibly detrimental effects of the negative influences. This involves going it alone for a while. You have to be willing to do this.
Take time for yourself. A few days in the mountains detached from everything and everyone else. You need that time to refresh yourself so you can come back to your work with newfound excitement. Also so you can come back to the church with newfound energy to tolerate your less than perfect peers and develop the self-awareness to know that they are tolerating you as well.