« free to read blogs | Main | fine sleeping weather »

July 23, 2004

on loneliness

When Christ was touring Galilee, he healed droves of the sick, and cured the blind, the lame, and the deaf. But lonely people were passed over. He didn't take away the loneliness of the pressing masses. He didn't enter villages and heal all their lonely people. And yet loneliness is the central problem He came to address. Did He not come to heal the rift which separated us from God? So what was the holdup?

Today it seems to be the same story. So many of us live lonely lives. And God knows we are lonely. We've told Him about it countless times. Yet we continue in our loneliness. We feel, sometimes, like the cripple at the Pool of Bethesda. Thirty-eight years he hung out by the pool, hoping that one day he'd defy the odds, and win the lottery. The impossible would happen to him. For thirty-eight years, the ridiculous impossibility of his own hope sat like a stone on his chest. By the time Jesus came by, the man couldn't even bear to talk about his infirmity directly anymore. He talked about his game plan for getting himself healed. Nonetheless, Jesus healed the guy on the spot. How many lonely people did Christ walk past on his way to the pool?

How many times has He walked past you in your loneliness? How many times have you wondered how long this could go on? Why do other people get what they need, but you stay lonely? What's the holdup?

The holdup is that loneliness requires a bigger healing. And the ingredients for the healing of loneliness are harder to come by. When Jesus healed the blind, he used ingredients like spit and mud. He also often asked for the patient's participation. He ordered the man at the pool to take up his bed and skedaddle. When it comes time to heal loneliness once and for all (for that is His aim), there will be dust and spit and mud and blood and fire. And there will be patients' participation.

The biggest logistical problem must certainly be the participation part. There are so many patients; it's hard to get them all participating. The planet's burden of loneliness is huge. You're just holding a part of it. And it's hard, because some of the patients have left their posts, and have tried various home-grown, superstitious remedies for loneliness. All of us have tried to shuck our chunk of the Loneliness at one time or another. Furthermore, when some of us try our own remedies, we hurt other patients even more, leaving them lonelier than ever. Nearly all of us have had our loneliness compounded and stomped on by other lonely people. Many of us are fixated on the nearby pool, or on that one particular person who would get us into the pool. But still the loneliness drags on indefinitely, and it's getting harder and harder to bear.

Don't give up. God has not overlooked the problem of loneliness, quite the opposite. The sick, the blind, the lame, and the deaf He healed incidentally, as He encountered them, simply because He could. All the ingredients were there, and there was no reason not to heal them. But His Big Plan has always been to cure loneliness once and for all, and that includes your loneliness. It's been a long, long time, and your loneliness may weigh so heavily on you that you find it hard to even think about it. But it's going away.

The cure for loneliness will be God's piece de resistance, His coup de grace. If He doesn't cure loneliness, all His other cures will be worthless, meaningless. All those people that Christ healed in Galilee eventually died. He healed them out of compassion, but He also knew that someday not so very far hence, those eyes would dim again. Those unstopped ears would again cease hearing. Someday those former cripples would lie down again for the last time. But His biggest healing, His ultimate cure was still coming.

There is coming a time when you will not be lonely anymore.

Posted by joel at July 23, 2004 03:23 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.chezjoel.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/12

Comments

Post a comment