FamilyLife Today®

Shelby Abbott: We live our lives socially on gas station snack food. We have these little tiny interactions with people. We're scrolling on our phone and we think that if we text someone or send them a goofy meme or a gif, we're actually connecting with people. But you're just shoving the equivalent of Doritos and Nerds Gummy Clusters into your mouth all the time. You're not actually getting nutrition the way that you need it.

Ann Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today®, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson.

Dave Wilson: And I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at familylifetoday.com. This is FamilyLife Today®.

Guest (Male): The audience needs a songwriting contest right now. This is happening between Shelby and Dave. You'll notice at the center of the table, we call this "Song in a Hat," even though there's no hat.

Shelby Abbott: Is this a surprise?

Guest (Male): Yeah. There are two things you'll be pulling from. One of them is the topic of the song. That's in the black bowl. The second thing in that cream-colored jar is a word that you have to incorporate in the song. You'll draw one piece of paper from each and you both will write a song, and then we'll have you perform it.

Dave Wilson: One of the reasons they came up with this idea is we watch you on Facebook and Instagram and you've got your little guitar up there.

Ann Wilson: You've got some parodies that you can do.

Shelby Abbott: I've done it one time!

Dave Wilson: And I do parodies too, so they came up with this idea. Shelby Abbott, the former voice of FamilyLife Today®.

Ann Wilson: I think you're going to be really good at this.

Shelby Abbott: Great, now no pressure. Thank you, Ann. Pick one and one.

Guest (Male): You've got to tell us what it is.

Shelby Abbott: Do I reveal what this is?

Guest (Male): Yeah, you've got to tell us what it is. Song about what?

Shelby Abbott: Arguing with your spouse. And here's the word I have to include: gumption. Gumption? Whose idea was this?

Dave Wilson: All right, mine is family dinner time. What's your word? What? I can't use that word.

Shelby Abbott: Is it inappropriate?

Dave Wilson: I don't know what it is.

Guest (Male): Pick a different one.

Dave Wilson: Let me see. Flummoxed?

Ann Wilson: Flummoxed. You're like bothered. You're frustrated.

Shelby Abbott: How do you say it? Flummoxed.

Dave Wilson: Flummoxed. I've never heard that word in my life.

Shelby Abbott: You need to read more.

Dave Wilson: Flummoxed? Flummoxed. Gumption. Family dinner time.

Dave Wilson: Sitting down for dinner with the kids and the dog. Food will be flying and I'll be flummoxed. Whatever the word is. Flummoxed! I'll be flummoxed. The kids will be on their phone and Mom will be so mad. I'm going to jump up and leave because I'm the one in charge because dinner time is a great time for fun, family fun. There's my song.

Shelby Abbott: Arguing with your spouse and gumption. She's got gumption and I can't function. We eat luncheon, her faults I mention. Tell me it's my fault, I'll tell her I love her because I just, just, just fired my inner lawyer. That's all I got. I tried to do a positive thing there at the end.

Dave Wilson: That even had a little bit of meaning behind it, Shelby. Are we done?

Guest (Male): That was more than I could have ever imagined. You guys nailed it.

Dave Wilson: Well, Shelby's not here to talk about songwriting.

Shelby Abbott: No, because I'm horrible at it.

Dave Wilson: You should go follow him on his Instagram. What's it called?

Shelby Abbott: Shelby Abbott. S-H-E-L-B-Y A-B-B-O-T-T. There's every once in a while a little parody on there. It depends on if I get the opportunity with students.

Dave Wilson: But welcome back to FamilyLife Today®. It's good to be here. I know maybe you saw the schedule with me coming today and you were like, "Well, well."

Ann Wilson: We were so happy. We were like, "Shelby's coming in the studio!" because we also know this book is amazing. And it's part of your heart and part of your journey.

Shelby Abbott: It is. It's called Why We're Feeling Lonely and What We Can Do About It. I really believe that loneliness is one of the major roadblocks for so many young people who are struggling to walk with God and just be connected to a community. Almost universally, in my conversations with young people over the last several years, the common denominator has been a struggle with loneliness in some form or fashion. So I wanted to explore why that's happening.

Dave Wilson: Was that true 20 years ago, 30 years ago?

Shelby Abbott: It's always been around for sure. I would guess that it's not as big of a deal back then as it has been now. I read a couple things and I will read the statistic to you. The Surgeon General of the United States sees loneliness as a public health concern equating its mortality impact to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Ann Wilson: I remember reading it thinking, "How can that be true? That's crazy!"

Shelby Abbott: It's really crazy because loneliness isn't just a thing that you feel, it affects you physically.

Dave Wilson: How many cigarettes are in a pack?

Shelby Abbott: You would know more than anybody just because your mother—

Dave Wilson: My father smoked.

Ann Wilson: My mom did too, and I'm thinking that's a pack or more a day.

Shelby Abbott: It was declared a loneliness epidemic in the United States. There are key factors that pour into that now to answer your question about was this happening in the past. Of course, it was happening in the past, but it's more of an issue now because of the technology that we have in our lives and how we've folded it into who we are as people that we think will make us more connected with others when in reality all it does is drive us apart.

There's nothing social about social media anymore. It was created to connect people, but now all it does is entertain people. It's just another form of entertainment. When you're sitting behind your phone waiting to be entertained, you're not actually connecting with anybody.

Dave Wilson: Does the next generation know that? Because I remember there was no technology, there was no cell phone. I remember when the first cell phone idea—we were in seminary, early eighties. They were using those big ones. They called it a bag phone. There was a big old thing you could take in your car.

Then when we first got a real cell phone, my thought was—and I think this was the MO of the day—this will eliminate bringing work home. I'll be able to get it done, I'll be connected, and I thought it would free up our life. And it did the exact opposite. You can't get away from work. It's the same thing in relationships, right?

Shelby Abbott: Absolutely. I would want to say that the heart of the desire to create social media was, as you put it in the name, to be social with other people. "Oh, you connect with your friends." That's what Facebook was when it first came out. It was only on college campuses. You had to have a .edu email address in order to sign up for Facebook when it first came out.

Ann Wilson: And MySpace. Wasn't that the first one?

Shelby Abbott: MySpace was another one. You could share music preferences and you had the top eight people who were your best friends at the top. You could move them. It was almost like a speed dial. Who was on your speed dial back then?

So it was opportunities to connect with people, but over time, as corporations got involved, advertising became part of it, we were vying for people's attention as opposed to their desire to connect with other people. Attention became the commodity that people wanted to utilize. If we can keep their attention, let's do whatever we can to sell them whatever we want to. It became like gambling as opposed to connection with other people in your life.

Dave Wilson: I've never heard that term with social media like gambling.

Shelby Abbott: It really is because you're rolling the dice to see what algorithm's going to hit, and then I can be more connected and actually make money. Well, they've hired people who invented and work on slot machines in Vegas at social media companies to help them actually understand how to keep people hooked, how to keep them connected.

Because slot machines, especially the digital ones now—I haven't played, but I've seen movies—they pull the thing or they push the button or whatever and it's a chance about what's going to happen. It's that addiction there that pours into the desire to see more, to absorb more, to connect more. So that is what people have utilized now to keep people's attention, and so it does the exact opposite of what it was invented for.

Ann Wilson: I think a lot of our listeners know you, know your voice, have an idea of what you've done in the past, but these younger generations really are important to you. Share a little bit why that is and even your background.

Shelby Abbott: I became a Christian through the ministry of Cru my freshman year at Virginia Tech. It changed my life. I got involved immediately and eventually became a leader within Cru. When I got to about midway through my junior year of college, I was like, "I've got to come on staff. This is what I have to do. This is what I feel like I'm built for." So I came right on staff as soon as I graduated, raised my support in about eight months, and my first ministry assignment was James Madison University in Virginia.

I was there for seven years doing what we would call normal campus ministry: leading a Bible study, discipling men, I ran our large group meeting, being in charge of retreats and conferences and things like that. I just loved it. I absolutely loved it. I felt like the old adage that Bill Bright came up with in the fifties was: "Reach the campus today, you reach the world tomorrow." I just bought into that completely.

The leaders of tomorrow were on the college campus today. It's a little bit different now culturally, but still, you're working with generally sharp people when they come to a college campus. People who want to get a career, they're driven in a certain way. If you could reach them at this key point in time in their life where they're not under the supervision of Mom and Dad anymore, where if they show up to a Bible study, they actually want to be there, they're not being forced to be there.

So you can be more serious about stuff. It doesn't have to always be, "Let's entertain them with a game first." No, let's actually hop into the Bible study. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, I love doing that kind of stuff, but there's a seriousness that people have. They don't want to be impressed. They want authenticity.

I might step on somebody's toes here, but they don't want the fog machines and the light shows and the perfectly curated worship set and the perfectly to-the-word talk or sermon. They enjoy those kind of things, but they'd rather have genuine connection. They would rather have authenticity. They would rather someone be up front and talk about their flaws and then talk about what they've learned as a result.

They still want mentors. They still want sages who have gone before them, and they don't really care what you look like. They would rather have someone talk about the reality of what they've gone through, and I'm all about that. I'm all about being genuine. I'm all about being real. I will talk about my flaws. I will talk about what I've gone through, what I'm currently struggling with. I am a failure just as much as they are. So if we point to Jesus, here's where you go to receive genuine help in your life, they're just going to respond to that.

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Ann Wilson: You've worked decades with these younger generations. So I'm guessing this topic is something that you've seen. Have you experienced this idea of loneliness and what are you seeing as you talk to these kids? Are you seeing it?

Dave Wilson: What she really wants to know is your story.

Shelby Abbott: I've definitely experienced loneliness in a sense that about five years ago, I was struggling a lot with physical pain. I have a herniated disc in my lower back that puts pressure on my sciatic nerve. I did everything to try to get rid of it and it's still present in my life. It's not as bad as it was before by the grace of God. But feeling pain—and Dave, you know this—physical pain can make you look around and go, "Nobody understands this. Nobody gets me."

Even my wife, who would try to be empathetic sometimes with certain things, I'd be like, "She does not understand." Just that sentence that you say to yourself puts distance between you and other people. It makes you feel like I'm all alone. Nobody gets it. So that, coupled with really just trying to connect with Jesus in those moments, can be really difficult until someone helps you to understand that Jesus really does get what you're going through.

By its very nature, you need people to tell you that. You need friends to be in your life. In this season in my life, when I was going through the height of my pain, I didn't have any guy friends who were really involved in my life. I had friends, of course, and casual acquaintances and people who I would call my friends that we would hang out with every now and then. But I never had someone looking at me and going, "Tell me genuinely what's going on with you."

Call me on my garbage. Put a mirror up in front of my face and say, "Actually, you're treating your wife this way and it's got to stop." Or throw your arm around me, cry with me, help me to be brutally honest about what's happening in my life. The combination of the pain and the lack of authentic friendships was just devastating for me in that time. I don't know if I would have labeled it as loneliness at the time. I can look back on it now and say that was definitely a season of loneliness for me.

But I was just self-pity, self-wallowing, and it's like nobody gets me, I don't really have any friends. Men, I think in particular, struggle with this when they get to middle age because it's hard to make guy friends who will actually ask you honest questions and go deep with you, who don't always want to stay on the surface level. Surface level is great. I love talking about football. I love talking about movies. I love joking around and being silly. I love rasing on people and joking, which is why I do that with you because I love you.

But I like that kind of stuff. If it's only that and you stay there all the time, your soul will eventually go, "I am starving for something. I am starving for something more. I need actual nutrition." So we live our lives socially on gas station snack food. We have these little tiny interactions with people. We're scrolling on our phone and we think that if we text someone or send them a goofy meme or a gif, we're actually connecting with people. But you're just shoving the equivalent of Doritos and Nerds Gummy Clusters into your mouth all the time. You're not actually getting nutrition the way that you need it.

When I discovered that, I started praying. "Lord, will You number one, help me to feel better physically, and then will You bring a friend into my life? Will You bring at least just one friend?" And by the grace of God, I met this guy at my church who I kind of knew a little bit before, but we all of a sudden hit it off and we decided to just be honest with one another and communicate gospel truths to one another, but just be brutally honest about what was going on in our lives.

It was scary because he was saying some truthful things about what was happening with him and I was like, "Yellow flags, red flags! This guy needs to work on a lot." And I'm sure he was thinking the same thing about me. But that ended up being a blossoming friendship that to this day, he is one of my best friends. He just texted me literally right now, it came through on my iPad.

I had this friend who was close, and then I committed with another friend who lives in Virginia. I live in Pennsylvania, and we have an hour-and-a-half long conversation once every month. It's on the calendar. It's by the clock, we do it every single time. We don't neglect it, we don't put it off. We ask each other hard questions, we laugh with one another, we pray with one another, and God answered that prayer. It was a life preserver, just throwing that up. "Will You help me?" And He did.

Dave Wilson: When you earlier said, "I was carrying around this pain and I had no one to talk to about it," I thought that's almost everybody. In one sense, that is husbands listening right now who feel like there's things they're carrying around they can't even talk to their wife about. Probably women feel the same way.

Ann Wilson: Dave and I were talking about this topic of loneliness as we were driving in today. I think my loneliest time was actually when our kids were little and our marriage was struggling. I felt like he was right beside me.

Dave Wilson: Thanks, Shelby. That was a great drive in today. We were married, we were doing great!

Ann Wilson: We were sleeping right beside each other and I felt like we were miles apart. I think that can happen in marriage. And I think as you're talking, this book just generates so many great conversations about loneliness, where we go to hide, the things that we do to cope with our loneliness, and we're going to get into that. But even your prayer, I'm thinking about the wife thinking, "I wish my husband just had one friend. I wish he'd pray that prayer." But you can pray it. You can stand in the gap for him.

I remember I was with my wife having a casual conversation and a neighbor from a different street came down and she was talking. My wife and her are friends. They would exercise together every now and then. Her husband—so my wife's friend's husband—is a great guy. He's really fun to be around. He's silly, he's goofy. He's got a lot of bizarre information about movies and televisions, like what type of television you should buy and all that kind of stuff. He's an interesting guy.

At one point, the woman who's his wife goes just casually, "Well, my husband doesn't have any friends, so he's always available for a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

Shelby Abbott: Was he standing beside—

Dave Wilson: No, no, he was not there. Knowing her personality, she probably would have said that if he was there. But when she said that, I was like, "Is that me? Does my wife say that about me too?" It made me really evaluate what was going on in my life. It was around the same time that I was just mentioning. So I was like, "I need to be more proactive about this."

Because my wife is really good at staying connected to people. She is loyal, she has friends from high school that she still meets with and communicates with. She's got friends from college that she connects with, and she's got a best friend now who she talks to every day. What if I had something like that? What if I was just more intentional? Men are intentional about what they're intentional about, whether it be working on cars, engineering, video games. With young people, I'm like, "You're intentional about Legos for crying out loud."

You put thought and effort into the things that you want to put thought and effort into. What if I would transfer that kind of energy into building friendships? Genuine friendships with other people who I could really go deep with. What if you as a wife were like, "My husband is really passionate about X, Y, and Z. What if he took that passion and transferred it onto making friends?" And not just guys that you would get together with in a garage, but men who would ask you hard questions, who would be annoying enough to get in your life and ask you what's actually happening and see what happens and how the Lord provides.

Dave Wilson: My first thought is the average guy says, "Uh-uh, don't sign me up for that," because you're afraid. They're going to dig into my life? I've got sins, I've got temptations, I've got things that I think about. I don't really want anybody to know. I'm just going to keep those to myself. That's my first thought. Women maybe like, "Yeah, I want to share that stuff and talk." Again, I don't know if that's true for women more than men, but I know a lot of guys that like the little cone of silence. I'm going to be stuck inside here. I can see you, you can see me, but you're not getting inside here.

So what do you say to that guy? Because we both know he needs it. I need it, but he's afraid of it because at the end of the day, if some guy that I really like this guy and we're friends, but if he probes in a little too deep, I don't think I want to go there.

Shelby Abbott: How's that working out for you? Just seriously, how's it working out for you? Because you can only self-entertain for so long. You can only watch so many YouTube videos before you're just done. COVID taught us that. Everybody, isolation is not a good thing. Every introvert in the world was like, "Yay, COVID! I get to be by myself for a while and people won't bother me." But several months in, everyone's clamoring for authentic connections with people.

Because that's how God's made us. We're made to be meaningfully connected. You are made that way and you can't run from that, no matter what your personality is. You are made to have genuine connections with people. So I would look at that guy and go, "How's it working out for you?" And then I would have a frank conversation and ask his permission to say, "Hey, do you give me permission to speak into your life?"

"Because I want to give you permission to speak into my life. Tell me the hard things, tell me the good things. Let's continue to laugh and have fun and talk about football or whatever. But do I have permission to ask you more in-depth questions, difficult questions?" And if he gives you permission and you give him permission, follow through with it. Go with it. It could be scary. Of course, it's scary to do that, but why should that stop you? Why should fear be the element that stops you from having the meaningful connections that God has made you for?

Dave Wilson: What a great day with Shelby. I love having Shelby with us. And what we talked about, I feel like it's so important and needed.

Ann Wilson: Go get his book. familylifetoday.com, you can click on the link in the show notes. Guess what? We're not done. We're going to have him back tomorrow. Maybe we'll make him sing again? I think we'll leave that just for one day. But it was good. It was better than mine.

Dave Wilson: We know life is full of challenges and families today need biblical truth more than ever. As a FamilyLife partner, your monthly gift helps bring the truth into homes every single day through podcasts, events, and resources. So let's make a lasting difference together. Become a partner today. Just go to familylifetoday.com and click the donate button.

Ann Wilson: FamilyLife Today® is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife, a Cru ministry, celebrating 50 years of helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.