A NEW FACET OF LONELINESS

This evening I experienced a strange sensation. It felt like that cinematographic technique of isolating one character for dramatic effect. The camera zooms in on that person and everything around him blurs into obscurity. That’s how I felt when I sat down at my usual seat at the kitchen table in front of a bowl of canned ravioli. Suddenly all that was clearly in focus was me and that bowl.

 This is loneliness, I said. There is only me. Actually this was just one facet of loneliness. There were more painful ones, those that made me weep and those that made me cry out to God for relief. This one just made me feel isolated.

 During the day I busied myself with Bible study, writing, working in the yard. But now at supper time, sitting there with the bowl of ravioli, I was alone. Linda was not in the other seat, she hadn’t been for over a year and a half now. No one was there and no one was likely to be there for a long time. How long? I wondered.

 As I pondered this new sense of aloneness, it occurred to me that Jesus endured loneliness even worse than mine for three and a half years. In my case, I know that there are people who know me and understand me. But right up to the last supper, Jesus was not fully understood, even by those closest to him. “"Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip? ” (John 14:9)

Yes, I am lonely, but not as lonely as my Lord was. And He reminds me of that when I get a text from one of my new widowed friends. Then that friend comes into focus along with me. I’m not alone anymore, and my life has value to others, as theirs does to me.