Me: You look lonely, sitting by yourself.
Prodigal: Being physically alone doesn’t mean you have to feel loneliness.
Me: True, God is always with us. You are not a lone!
This is from the book Facing Loneliness: The Starting Point of a New Journey by J. Oswald Sanders
Being alone involves only physical separation, but being lonely includes both spiritual and psychological isolation. It produces a solitude of heart, the feeling of being cut off from others whom we should like to have as friends.
A certain degree of solitude–being alone with one’s thoughts–is a normal state. It is essential to the cultivation of the inner life. We all experience times when it becomes essential to escape what Thomas Gray called “the madding crowd’s ignoble strife” and engage in constructive introspection. Without such periodic physical withdrawal, the spiritual life will lack depth and freshness. In such a period of solitude we will find a welcome alternative to the rat race of modern life.
Take an hour today and just be in solitude with the Lord. You need a freshness after all of the rat race.
And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
1 Corinthians 13:13
Jennifer Van Allen
www.theprodgialpig.com
www.faithincounseling.org
