How do we live in the most connected generation and yet feel so alone? What do we do when we find ourselves struggling with loneliness?

Author and lawyer Justin Whitmel Earley argues that loneliness isn't the way God intended for us to live because we were made for deep and intentional friendships. It was his own journey through a season of depression and anxiety led him to discover the power of spiritual disciplines including the practice of embodied community. In his latest book, Made for People: Why We Drift into Loneliness and How to Fight for a Life of Friendship, Justin looks at how we as a culture have gotten to this epidemic of loneliness and how we can find our way back to what God has for us when it comes to friendship.

In this episode, Davey talks with Justin on how spiritual disciplines can help us in our suffering, the ways in which our daily decisions are forming us and how to combat loneliness with true, Christ-centered connection.

If you are struggling with feeling alone even though your life is full of interactions each and every day, this conversation will help you recognize how to take the first steps towards the life-giving friendships God has for you.

How do we practice the way of Jesus when our lives are riddled with pain and suffering? What does it look like to grow spiritually when we are hurting?

Author and Bible teacher John Mark Comer has been leading others towards what he calls an apprenticeship with Jesus, teaching how we can learn the intended rhythms and practices God wants us to engage in by simply looking to how Jesus walked and talked in this world. We are all being spiritually formed by something, he argues, and if we want it to be a formation in the likeness of Christ then we need to learn to sit with Him, become like Him and do the things Jesus did. This is the very message of his latest book, Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus, Become like him, Do as he did, which can help Christians learn the spiritual disciplines that Jesus taught and modeled for all believers.

In this deeply insightful conversation, Davey and Aubrey chat with John Mark about what spiritual formation is, what types of spiritual disciplines we should be doing in our seasons of pain and suffering, and the important impact of community when we are hurting. They go on to talk about the dark night of the soul, a spiritual experience often described by theologians but rarely discussed in churches, in which God removes the felt sense of his presence while remaining as near as He ever was. It can be one of the most disorienting experiences for those who encounter it and yet as John Mark shares, there is a richness offered in the spiritual life of the one who walks through it.

If you've been struggling to do basic spiritual disciplines in your suffering or if you've been wrestling with a deep sense of God's absence in your life, this episode is a gentle reminder that God is with you when you are hurting and that He invites you into rest and to simply be when you don't have the strength to do.