Alone?

Writing this is blog is always difficult for me. Gathering my thoughts into some kind of coherent form requires discipline and concentration. Lately I have had a lot of thoughts brewing. Rather than wait until I have worked them all out I will write some here. Perhaps you all who read this can benefit from the process.

A lot has happened in the past year. Indeed in the last few years I have experienced the loss of my mother in law. My job of 26 years came to an end. My close friends have lost mothers to death; my mother had to enter a nursing home. I also started a new job with all the adjacent stresses that go with that process. I have had dear friends work through incredibly hard times, as I looked on feeling helpless and alone.

Alone is not in the economy of God. Everything about His dealings with man through the ages speaks of His close involvement with us. He creates Adam with a need for companionship and then meets that need. He goes looking for Adam and Eve after the fall. He seeks out Abraham, Moses, and Elijah. He calls the elders of Israel to “dine” with Him on the mountain. He calls His greatest gift Emmanuel, God with us. To leave us alone is the antithesis of God's glory that He so longs to reveal to us.

But I oft feel alone. The Scriptures, which He Himself breathed into life, are full of the stories of those who felt alone, abandoned. The Psalms written by the man who God describes as “a man after my own heart’, are replete with questioning cries of ‘where are you?”

Prior to going to the cross Jesus tells the disciples that He will not be alone in His passion and yet from the cross cries “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me”. The Son of Man “felt” alone as the sins of the world clouded His view of the Father. He too felt that sense of aloneness as the sin and shame blinded him to the reality of the Father.

Contrary to popular theology I do not find in Scripture God looking away from the Son as He bore the sins of the world. Instead I see as it say in 2 Corinthians “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself”. Indeed if the Father abandoned the Son on the cross then Jesus would have lied to the disciples when he said I am not alone but the Father is with me.

So to feel alone is to join that great company of the friends of God who found in the end they were anything but alone. Indeed to be alone can not happen now that I am in Him. He is mine and I am His. As much as I enjoy and like those tangible moments when God reveals His presence I am equally at home with those moments when I do not see Him.

Have you ever noticed that it was in God’s greatest silence at the cross that He was doing His greatest work of love? It is as Jesus is crying out that God cleared the debt of my sin, removed my guilt and shame and tore down all the walls that would keep me from Him. A Father and Son conspired before the foundation of the world to deliver me from aloneness.

I do not say I should enjoy my aloneness, but I do welcome it as an opportunity to bring glory to God. It is entirely likely that it is during those times He is working in me a far greater weight of glory.

Soosh..be still. God is here.