Refuge for the Lonely
“After all: when our Lord sought refuge, when his heart was troubled, it was not to the temple that he went to pray. It was to the garden.”
-Fred Bahnson, Soil and Sacrament, p.6
“Turn to me and be gracious to me, for I am lonely and afflicted.
Relieve the troubles of my heart and free me from my anguish.
See how numerous are my enemies and how fiercely they hate me!
May integrity and uprightness protect me, because my hope…is in you.”-Psalm 25:16-18, 21
When I am in the depths of my own despairs, can I honestly say all that I desire is you? (Psalm 73:25). When I am feeling alone or lonely, to whom do I reach out for a kindred spark of sympathy? If the soul has been on an extended fleshly “fast” from the rich milk of His Word, and my spirit is hungry within yet too apathetically weak to eat, and it feels as if there are none around to cheer me on through the hard places, it is exuberant faith that is the remedy for the ailment. It means kicking into motion the words of Psalm 27:13.
I would have lost heart unless I had believed I would see the goodness of the Lord.
-Psalm 27:13
These are not idle words of a weak, heart-sick lover, but of a violent warrior! I am reminded of Matthew 11:12, “the kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing, and the violent take it by force.” Will I rise to the occasion and wrestle my emotions into submission and press on?
We have often heard the adage that some people fail to make the eight-inch connection between their mind and heart; it is a paradigm shift from knowledge to belief and acting upon that belief. In the case of a believer who is prone to the roller-coaster pilgrimage of being swept along with their emotions, this adage becomes the necessary application: I must cease acting upon the whims of my heart-sick woes and know that I am safe in believing that my God is faithful, and He is what my heart-hungry soul needs.
When I encounter disappointment, frustration, anger, or loneliness; if any basic soul-need is in a state of being unmet, my tendency is to fall back on patterns that feed the flesh rather than feed the spirit. In those times, I am in the clutches of any idolatry greater in my mind than our great God. I need to identify this pattern, posture myself in a place of faith, instead of allowing a lackadaisical approach of coping, feeding on the natural remedy of food for anxiety or isolating myself. In our present generation, the enemy has given his panacea for waywardness and lost souls in this one sin: worry. Worry leads to anxiety, which tends to lead us to hyper-focusing inward on self, which isolates us in self-deprecation, where it’s so easy to let our minds dwell on false narratives of our circumstances.
The promises of God’s Word do not return void (Isaiah 55:11) as we apply them as a salve to our battle-weary perspectives and dented and sometimes rusty armor. It is choosing to believe He is with me in those times I feel alone and know He is faithful in being my refuge. When I am feeling isolated and friendless, am I yet able to sing “When I am alone, Give me Jesus?” When I am feeling surrounded by unjustified or immutable circumstances, can I truly claim Psalm 27:5 over me and hide myself in His pavilion, surrounded by His presence?
“In the day of trouble he will keep me safe in his dwelling;
he will hide me in the shelter of his sacred tent and set me high upon a rock.”-Psalm 27:5
In the midst of my own perceived networks of these physical surroundings, verse six declares that “now my head shall be lifted up above my enemies (or my circumstances) all around,” therefore, I will offer sacrifices of joy in His tabernacle; I will sing, yes, I will sing praises to the Lord. This means clothing my spirit with praise, renewing my mind, and choosing to adopt a new pattern of thinking or posture of praise. In a spiritual sense, we can choose the posture in which we sit in the heavenlies, surrounded by Him.
“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses,
let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles…
Consider him who endured such opposition…
so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.”-Hebrews 12:1, 3
“We fight not for ourselves alone. These are they—our brethren—the cloud where with we walk encompassed…if we so wrestle that we prevail.
The morning that follows the night of our lonely trial would…find us new men…”-Henry Scott Holland
“There are, too, enemies,—open or secret,—whose enmity we may feel yet cannot define… It will be appropriate to the solemn self-examination of the period of Lent to ask ourselves, Is there any false friend or covert enemy whom we must learn to tolerate, to forbear with, to pity and forgive? Can we in silent offices of love wash their feet as our Master washed the feet of Judas? And, if we have no real enemies, are there any bound to us in the relations of life whose habits and ways are distasteful to us? Can we bear with them in love?”
-Harriet Beecher Stowe
“Blessed are you when people hate you,
When they exclude you and insult you and reject you…because of the Son of Man.”-Luke 6:22