No man is an island

I´m one of the many who on occasion feel out of place in this world, and today it happen to be one such occasion. I can honestly not see what good I am doing in this world, not today. Yes, I´m doing my preaching and teaching, but does it change a thing? Would anything be different, for better or worse, had I never left the factory where I was working back then twentyfour years ago, when I started to work as a full time preacher? Am I spending my life on a spiritual wildgoosechase?

Tomorrow this darkness will probably be gone, it hits every now and then, and then it´s gone,  and I can make a very qualified guess where it is coming from, but right now it is here, and I have to deal with it, and with the sense of loneliness and lack of meaning it always brings with it. And I have to deal with it in the right way, or it will get worse!

Few songs have touched my  sense of loneliness like Simon & Garfunkels ”I´m a rock” does.

I still remember being a teenager with a few people I knew and almost no friends, feeling strange and apart, and understood by no one, and listening to Paul Simon as he like magic managed to put words to my feelings.

Judging from how popular this song was I wasn´t the only one who connected to these lyrics!

”A winters day, in a deep and dark december, I am alone,

Gazing from my window to the streets below
On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow.
I am a rock, I am an island.

I´ve built walls, a fortress deep and mighty,
That none may penetrate.
I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain.
Its laughter and its loving I disdain.
I am a rock, I am an island.

Don´t talk of love, I´ve heard the word before;
It´s sleeping in my memory.
I won´t disturb the slumber of feelings that have died.
If I never loved I never would have cried.
I am a rock, I am an island.

I have my books and my poetry to protect me;
I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock, I am an island.
And a rock feels no pain;
And an island never cries”

If we give in to this kind of response to disappointment and loneliness, if we choose to hide, to close the door and let no one in, to put up so many defences that in the end nobody can reach us anymore, then we have chosen a strategy of survival that will destroy us in the end.

It doesn´t protect you from bitterness or from any other kind of destructive feelings, it doesn´t protect you from the evil words or acts of other people, but it does very effectively close out all friendship, all love, all good things that might come your way!

This kind of shield and armour produces the opposite of what the lonely and hurt imagines it would bring!

Ever since Adam and Eve tried to hide themselves among the bushes in the Garden of Eden, this has been Man´s instinct. To run and hide, in order to protect themselves.

And it kills us, because we weren´t made for loneliness!

And when I myself remember how I felt back then, fortyfive years ago, I realize once again how fantastic it is that I got saved, that someone handed me my invitation to go home to my Father, come to the one place from which I shall never get thrown out.

I´ll never be alone again…