When I feel alone.
Twitter had a post the other week: one woman, Alexandra, recounting the day a stream of cars drove past her home. The reason? It was her son’s 3rd birthday, his party obviously cancelled but his little friends were driven past to say ‘Happy Birthday’ – at a safe distance. You can imagine the impact this brief connection with friends made; the longing for contact seems hard-wired into us. Now, whether you tend towards extrovert or introvert I suspect we’re all beginning to feel the poverty of reduced connections. At that point, even as a society who have largely forgotten God, we seem to unconsciously echo his words from Genesis 2:18: ‘It is not good for the man to be alone.’
The current pandemic, with social distancing and health threats, has the ability to make us feel alone. Physical isolation, obviously, but also a suspicion our personal situation is not really cared about. ‘Nobody knows what it’s like for me having to…’ (you can complete that yourself): ‘..live alone’, ‘…be locked down with these people’, ‘…stop working’, ‘…continue working’. In some ways they’re all expressions of the same thought, ‘I feel alone’.
My temptation is to ease that feeling with either:
self-pity (poor me),
self-centredness (it’s all about me) or
self-indulgence (I’ll just look after me).
Each offer momentary relief, yet because it remains me they exacerbate the problem: ‘I feel alone’.
The good news about Jesus brings a different hope. In Matthew 25:40 Jesus pictures, in a parable, a future day when he will commend his faithful followers saying, ‘whatever you did for the least of these brothers or sisters of mine you did for me.’ Tucked into these words are profound truths known to Christians the world over. The Jesus who died and rose again did so to gather people he’s forgiven into a new family, the church. If you belong to him you’re not alone. Beyond that, Jesus not only describes himself as brother to his people but identifies more closely, whatever is done to you is done to him. He really is with you – you’re not alone. He says all this is true even for ‘the least’, so not even a poor verdict on yourself will cause you to fall from this connection – you’re not alone.
The parable describes people in hard isolating situations: a stranger, someone lacking basic necessities of food and clothing, someone ill or locked up (sounds surprisingly contemporary). Yet Jesus says those who know him as Saviour find his grace turns them away from self-centredness and outwards to those who could feel alone. We can’t gather as church now; things are not as they should be. Yet when you feel alone the solution is not self-reliance but remembering Jesus and asking him, by his grace, to lead you in care for others, reminding and remembering we’re not alone. We do this in the hope we’ll gather again soon and looking ahead to the day we gather with the Lord forever.