[Image:JestWaitin, 2013, JA Van Devender]
(Pro 8:34 NKJ) " Blessed is the man who listens to me, Watching daily at my gates, Waiting at the posts of my doors."
A city's streets can be among the loneliest places on earth.
I remember as a very young, pre-teen, going down to stay with my dad in New Orleans. He worked then as a welder at a local shipyard. His hours were sporadic but usually he was gone by day-light and I was pretty much on my own till he got home. I can't remember exactly where he lived, I think it was the Gentilly Woods area but I recall palm trees (strangely) lining a boulevard... and the early morning quiet with the streets deserted. There was no danger then for a kid to walk the street in the cool of the morning but the impression it made is indelible. There were people all around... inside their homes... and each life was a story in its own right, but their story did not overlap mine. I wasn't from "around there" ... I was a stranger in a strange land.
Wandering around, or simply exploring the empty streets and alleys, was interesting but the omnipresent sense of transience made everything superficial and temporary, including me. That, I think, is the essence of loneliness. Kris Kristofferson captures the idea perfectly in his well known song "Sunday Morning Coming Down". [12 Sunday Morning Coming Down]
We human beings were not designed to be alone. Somewhere I read that absolute solitary confinement in prisons can reduce a man to insanity more effectively than physical torture. When faced with loneliness, either physical, social, relational, or whatever, that which sustains us is a sense of its impermanence. Our hope is that it is a passing condition. We can stand on the corner and wait, solitary, contained within ourselves... but not forever. That which holds us together, the only thing that keeps the demons at bay, is the knowledge that sooner or later the bus will come... or our friends will appear... or the pathway forward will open to us and we will find where we fit.
There are some parallels there with Christian life in this fallen world. There are occasions when the sense that we are from "somewhere else" presses heavy upon us. Perhaps some circumstance, the loss of a loved one, set backs in our fiscal situation, rejection by someone whose good opinion we earnestly desire, highlights the effects of our fallen condition. Life in a fallen world is like living in a big city, full of people, but with the streets empty. We know it is going to change... but we have to wait.
Paul puts this in terms of "reconciliation." There will be a day when the fullness of human relationships and the integration of our personalities will finally banish all loneliness and emptiness. Then and only then will our true humanity be fully and finally and eternally completed. Only then will we know what it means to "know even as we are known" and discover the joy of that thorough integration with others and with our God that is the purpose of history.
Now we are strangers... in the world and even to ourselves. It is a lonely place and can be, to some, excruciatingly so. But it is a passing condition. It will end in God's time. All we have to do is wait and not lose hope.
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