This week, I have been alone a lot once the kids have gone to bed.
I have realized that being alone is easy. There is no conflict. Alone is comfortable. No one needs you to do anything for them. No one can hurt you or let you down. Mr. Fantastic can’t ask me to watch cheeky British sci-fi when I would rather watch elegant British drama. Alone is even productive and fun. The laundry gets folded and I get to play Christmas music in early November.
Being alone is like taking a vacation from your problems. Alone is safe. But too much alone can be too safe- safe like a jail cell. No one gets in to hurt you, but you’re no longer free.
All the really wonderful parts of life are also the most risky parts of life. They are risky because they involve the most complicated, fickle thing in all of creation: other human beings. Love, friendship, church, businesses and family top the list of things that can make life wonderful, or that make it a living hell. It all depends on the day.
Just watch Tom Hanks in the movie Cast Away and you realize alone is really the most painful way to live. We are made to love and be loved. We are made to trust and believe and hope and dream in relationships. That is where our souls are free, where we rise above the fear and soar over our pain.
To love another simply because we have promised and because God wants us to makes us more than we were before. It makes us more like God, actually. To take our caged, protected hearts and set them free with the words of 1John 4 is do a miracle like none other.
“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.”
We do not love because the people around us love us first. One person’s love does not birth love in the heart of another. It is His love that blooms and grows in our souls. Everything always begins with Him.
I love a wonderful man and four crazy kids. I am loved by them in return. Sometimes it is shining and brilliant and sometimes it is really, really hard. I also love Someone I have never seen, and I love Him more than I love my very life. It is that love that makes it possible to do the hard times. Because I am not alone.
Thank God.
