Just me

The first wedding anniversary without my husband just passed. I began mulling it over a few weeks before. I knew it would be…hard. One day I looked up to the heavens and said, ‘It’s just me’. I know, head knowledge, it’s not true. I have children and grandchildren, friends, and most of all Jesus. But my heart is slow to catch up to this truth. My heart says: broken.

But isn’t so much of our world? Children with cancer, broken marriages, young adults lost in loneliness. Truly we have made a mess of things in the 6,000 years or so since God looked on His creation and said, “It is good.” As man and woman breathed their first in a place of perfection God changed His assessment, “It is very good.”

And it was, for a while. We know the rest of the story telling of that sudden, awful breaking of relationship with God. And ever since, we have increasingly perpetuated all that sin ruins. Still the Father chose to make a way to perfection once more. When we surrender to Jesus, we find ourselves in the now and not yet of it.

Today my daughter sent a short video of my almost 8-year-old grandson dancing and singing his heart out at a Slugs & Bugs concert. The pure innocence of it brought me to streaming tears and trembling lips. Can we just bottle that and sprinkle it on all of us? A joy of singing God’s praises like nothing else matters to dust on our weary souls?

Again, I lifted my eyes and said to my Savior, ‘My little guy’s PopPop would have loved to have been at that concert with him. He would have danced and sang too. Why do I have to be all alone?’ Then that quiet reminder: ‘PopPop is dancing and singing whenever He wants. Singing praises to the One who made his body whole once more with no disease or pain.’ Truth again.

What are you all alone in today? A world of PTSD? A feeling of not fitting in? The heartbreak of infertility? “And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Advocate, who will never leave you. He is the Holy Spirit, who leads into all truth.” (John 14:16-17a NLT)

The enemy wants to isolate us. To have us search for relief in a bottle or a needle. To look for it in a bed we don’t belong in. To lie and cheat our way to wealth or power. But all those things, though they may mask the ache for a while, never fill our needy soul. “And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20 NLT)

Someday we will have no doubt of the ultimate truth and promise in God’s Word. Whether we enter into it through death or through His return, we will never have the thought again that ‘it’s just me’. “Look, God’s home is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them.” (Revelation 21:3b NLT)