The Off Ramp Nobody Talks About
- Grove Church
- 5 hours ago
- 2 min read
There's a billboard that a lot of us have been driving past for years, and we barely notice it anymore. It doesn't say anything dramatic. It doesn't promise something obviously destructive. In fact, it sounds kind of reasonable.
You're better off on your own. Easier. Safer. Less complicated.
That's the off ramp of loneliness. And it might be the quietest, most overlooked one on the whole road.
The Promise That Doesn't Deliver
Mark opened this week's sermon — the final one in our Off Roads series — by pointing out that most of the things that pull us off the path to life fall into one of two categories: they promise something great and don't deliver, or they make us afraid of something that isn't actually as dangerous as advertised.
Loneliness works both angles.
The promise: life is just easier when you don't have to deal with other people. No awkwardness, no vulnerability, no getting your heart broken. You get to run on your own schedule, keep your own rules, protect the version of yourself that nobody else has to see. There's something that sounds like freedom in that.
The fear: if anyone actually knew the real you — not the version you present, but the one beneath the surface — they wouldn't want to stick around.
Both of those voices are lying. But they're convincing enough that a lot of us have quietly organized our lives around them.
What Ecclesiastes Actually Says
Ecclesiastes is one of the Bible's wisdom books — the kind of writing that looks at life honestly, without sugarcoating it, and tries to make sense of things as they actually are. It doesn't promise everything will be fine. It deals with how fast life goes, how hard it gets, how little we control.
And in the middle of all that, it stops to say something simple: two are better than one.
Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 lays it out plainly. Two people working together produce more. When one falls, the other can help them up. Two people staying warm together can survive conditions that would take out one person alone. And if someone gets attacked? Two people back to back have a fighting chance that one person standing alone simply doesn't.
None of this is complicated. It's almost too simple. Which is probably why it's easy to dismiss.
The Stuff We Try to Do Alone
Mark shared some poignant stories from his life that illustrate this wonderfully. There was the shipping container full of heavy Indian hardwood furniture that he decided to unload solo. The trucker pulled up and asked where the forklift was. There wasn't one. Four hours later, getting charged more every thirty minutes, Mark was still at it alone. He tried a few times with these shipments to do it alone. He got better but continued to struggle, until a friend eventually stepped in, brought his dad's crew, and got the whole thing done in thirty minutes.
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