Psalm 25:16 Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted.

There was a time when I could be in a room with hundreds of people and I felt alone. It wasn’t a matter of not knowing some of the people in attendance, it was the absence of connection on the most intimate level. If we don’t have someone we can open up to with the deepest parts of ourselves, we are alone, even in a crowd.

Loneliness is an affliction of the soul.

Genesis 2:18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”

God recognized the issues of loneliness and set the stage to accomplish an end to loneliness.

So what went wrong?

The simple answer is Satan coming along and whispering in Eve’s ear, “What you have isn’t enough.” Believing the lie led to sin and thus the issue of loneliness expanded into the realm of want which made need seem small and insignificant. 

Sin does that, it will not let its victim rest. It causes the victim to want more and more and more, never truly being satisfied. That is what sin does. In the end, it wears out its victim, until they are totally consumed.

There is something to say about people who come together only because they are lonely. The divorce rate in America is high because empty people cannot fill one another.

David’s prayer is earnest and honest. “Turn to me and be gracious to me.” He is asking God to fill the void in his heart.

I’ve been married now for eighteen years, my second marriage, having been a widower. My wife’s fiance died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm. Then we turned to God and prayed the exact same prayer.

“Show me your will for my life.”

God answered both of our prayers with each other. God is good, God is merciful, God knows how best to bring together proper helpmates.

But she is not the One I was talking about when I said “I am not alone.”

2 Peter 3:10-11

 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness,

Here it is, the middle of the night, and I have just got up and my mind is upset by fiction and then reality sinks in when I get a letter from Victim Services that my brother-in-law has been removed from his current parole review and will not be getting out of prison. Why that is important to us is because he is the one that set our house on fire back in 2009.

This is a fair warning about how escaping reality into a world of entertainment can consume our very thoughts because the world can be a very disturbing place. Many of us have gone through some very painful experiences. It is for each of us to decide how to mourn and when our mourning period can be replaced with a new reality.

As I sought help from His Word this verse came to me as being appropriate to my work for the Lord. This ties into recent posts about those things that will be changed in ways beyond our control. As I said in yesterday’s post, our sins will not be forgotten. Here today, we find more scriptures that indicate that everything done will be exposed.

What that means to me is private and personal. My Lord has given me peace about that which I have done but that does not mean I do not have to answer to them. What is done cannot be undone. Now today, Peter’s words, inspired by God, remind me what I am today and what I do with Christ matters more than my past.

My past haunts me and I would be a liar if I did not say it did not. More often than not my past life feels like fiction and holds no reality for me today. Like the fiction that upset me last night because it did not go the way I wanted, I do not get to author that outcome and I do not get to write the outcome of my future. I do however have to live it out to discover how this life in Christ plays out.

How would we feel about the end Peter speaks to in the above scripture?

That is very personal. I will not tell anyone how to feel about it. We all have a past, a present and a future. I don’t get to write that story for you. It is your story and you have to make it about your relationship with God, not me.

This is your life, your story and Peter is asking what you are going to do with the time left. As for me, I will seek the Lord and seek instruction for what He would have us do together.

I am not alone.