The Illusion of Loneliness

I can't pinpoint when exactly I discovered that my feelings were not synonymous with the truth. That my feeling slighted, stupid, afraid or desperate did not mean that those feelings were warranted. That feeling distant from someone I thought I loved didn't mean that I was distant or that I didn't love them. Feelings are tricky things, and whenever that moment was--that very first epiphany of the separation between emotion and reality--it changed everything.

There was a night a few weeks back when I sat barefoot on the carpet in my closet and felt achingly, desolately alone. It was a feeling that expanded through my whole body, a poisoning surety of failure, loneliness, and loss that neither the forgiving darkness nor the warm presence of walls of fabric could soothe away.

I had prayed. Pleadingly. I had cried until my veins should have run dry. And the reward, it seemed, was a consuming black emptiness.

Then, like a sudden pinpoint of light, I remembered: I'm pregnant. There is a tiny person in me. I am literally never alone.

And then, right on the heels of that thought, the recognition that even if I weren't pregnant, the truth would never change: I am never alone. None of us are. We have a Father in Heaven who knows us and loves us and watches out for us all the time. We have a Savior, brother, who has felt each exact pain, who can understand and empathize with everything we ever feel, no matter how we hurt.

The feeling--the sadness, the loneliness--didn't evaporate, but my knowledge of its falsehood changed my heart. I thought of it again today.

I've been spoiled the last few months by getting to wake up to sunshine, with my sweetheart sleeping next to me and the kids giggling in one of their rooms.

Today, Steve having kissed me goodbye in the dark many hours before as he left for his first shift of residency, I woke up alone. I didn't expect it to affect me as much as it did, but I went through the first half of the day frantic to be busy, to keep moving, to stave off the clawing homesickness that kept inching into my heart. He was three miles away, but I missed him enough for a thousand. And again, I felt an ache that threatened to take me over.

But feeling it doesn't make it real. I am not alone. We are not apart. We are not unguided. I don't have to do anything in the days and years ahead on my own. And neither does he.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Isaiah 55:8-9

Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.

John 14:27