Lately my family and I have been watching the survival show Alone in the evenings. The premise is that ten people are dropped off at different locations around Vancouver Island with only a backpack of gear and must figure out how to survive alone. When they reach their breaking point, they can call the rescue team to come get them. The contestant who makes it the longest wins $500,000.

We’ve enjoyed the discussions that watching the show has facilitated, particularly in regards to what makes people most successful at survival. The ones who stick it out tend to be the ones with the best mental attitudes, and it seems pretty apparent that in these scenarios, what’s happening internally makes the biggest difference in how the external is handled. 

Aside from the obvious physical needs that must be met, a major struggle in this type of challenge is the lack of companionship. Watching others find ways to keep their outlook positive while overcoming hardships alone really has me thinking about the ways we do this in everyday life, when it seems as though we have nobody in our corner and nowhere left to turn.

Several times in my life I have been through heartaches in which I felt like I was suffering completely alone. Even those who knew the struggles I was having couldn’t fully understand what I was going through because it wasn’t their experience. You have likely been through those times as well, when you felt totally abandoned in your pain, or perhaps you felt dismissed or even blamed when you opened up about how you felt. Sometimes even our closest relationships can’t provide for us in ways they have in the past – not every grief can be walked through in community.

Some painful experiences are so uniquely woven into our story that only we can have the spiritual eyes to navigate them. There are times when others may not be able to give us the counsel we need or may not even be able to give us the companionship we crave. Broken people trying to help other broken people is always a hard process.

But God is not broken, and that is the one source that has complete understanding. We may feel distant from Him as well, and we may feel that He too has abandoned us, but He is the only one who has the tools to give us that allow us to walk through the suffering and then turn what we’ve learned into our purpose. 

When I was lonely and desperate and had tried all my other sources of comfort, God was all I had. Nothing humbles you more or redirects your path more than the recognition of your total dependence on God alone. It’s easy to keep trucking along when you see others next to you, walking similar paths, but it’s in the hopelessness and despair that arise when we walk our solitary paths that we find the most meaningful transformations.

The growth we experience in our darkest hours can change us from the inside out. We are image bearers, designed to reflect Him to a lost, hurting, broken world, and it is only through encounters with Him that make this possible. Seeking His face when we have no other option never leaves us as we are – it sustains us while we’re enduring, and it frees us to reach new heights once we have overcome.

So as I watch others test their survival skills in the wild, I am reminded that we are never truly alone. My resilience is a gift, borne out of adversity, but forged and refined by the guiding presence that empowers me to walk in His purposes. I will suffer, I will struggle, I will endure, and sometimes I will feel completely and utterly alone. But when we get to the end of ourselves, there we find our only hope.