Not Alone.

The truth is, sometimes I feel very alone. It’s not a surface kind of feeling, really. I think it’s an awareness of something deep inside me that is not connected to people like I hope to be.

When I first started coming to Woods Chapel, it was also around the time when I began to seriously follow Jesus. Maybe I’ve been a Christian for a long time. I don’t really understand the criteria there. But I certainly was only beginning to fall in love with Christ.

Around that time, when we would take Communion, I would cry. I mean, I would just sob a sort of sniveling man-snob. I’ve noticed when I’m about to cry, my body will start rocking back and forth ever so slightly – like when I have to pee really bad and I need to hold it. And I lock my jaw so no one knows I’m crying unless they look at my eyes. I think I can make an argument that tears are masculine, but not if there is sound involved. Anyway, I would look in the faces of the people walking by to take Communion, and something inside me would well up and overflow.

The same thing happens in other contexts, too. Two times recently come to mind. Once, my wife and I were watching a short film. They were interviewing people on the street. “If you could make just one wish come true today, what would it be?” The answers didn’t matter as much as the faces. People I’ll never get to know. One of my favorite musicians, Jack Johnson, calls them “all the people in the street that I’ll never get to meet if these tracks don’t bend somehow.”

Again, I cried a lot. A good cleansing, mysterious sort of cry (but one I’d prefer to share with only my wife or my mom.)

The other time I was at Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, KS for their Leadership Institute. They showed a video of three young adults who have been hurt by the church in some way. Each described some really heartfelt, valid reasons for their negative opinions of church. And I just cried there in my seat at this church, feeling sort of helpless and asking God if I can be the one that helps bring these people home. Because…

Well, I missed them. That is the only way I can describe what I felt for those people. And I started to think of all the times my heart breaks around people. Why does it do that? I miss them, I guess. I miss every damn one of you.

You know, we have the same Father – all of us. And what father wants to see his children separated, isolated from each other? Scared to make eye contact with each other. Scared to hug each other. Scared to need each other. To be vulnerable. To say we feel alone.

We are not alone. We were not made to be alone. And even though this is the state we often find ourselves in, our God is not detached. He is not looking down on us with consternation or even pity. He loves us enough that He came to be “God with us.” Alone with us. Scared with us. Vulnerable with us. “Screaming along side us” to the death. Then He beat death, and not only death but all the things that feel like death to us. Like our loneliness. He showed the way to new life. I believe that all of us who are following Him are being restored. Out with the old and the broken, which is death, and in with the new and whole, which is life.

I am being shaped. It is pretty uncomfortable, and I’m scared I’ll always have this awkward, unfinished look about me. But He knows what He’s doing, I suppose, and that gives me hope. It makes me think that other people might feel this way, too. And that maybe our family can be reunited. That would be like Heaven for me.

But why wait?

With Love,

a young shepherd.