The Cure For Loneliness
by Faith Dickerson
Last night the adults in the village met in the Town Hall with two of the leaders here in the village. They talked to us about our children and gave us instructions on how to help them live, how to love them more, how to really see them and their struggles.
While Abba was talking, he reminded us again of how the most devastating thing a human being can experience is loneliness. He said that our world today is filled with people that are lonely and who desperately want friends. He spoke of people having their own thoughts that cause them to end up separating themselves from others. What he described was a picture of hell. I know. I remember.
Before I came to the body of Christ, I lived a life searching for God. I had felt God near me as a child, and I loved Him. I was raised in a very dysfunctional family, but I felt as long as He was near, I’d survive. I wanted to give Him my life.
But it seemed as though this choice was a lonely choice. How could that be? How could that be in a world full of people that needed God? It made no sense to me. Where were His people? I thought: If I could find them, they would be like me—they would want to love Him, too.
As I grew up, I did what most people in America do to search for God. I went to church. I quickly saw that, while some people seemed to sincerely want God, no one agreed how He wanted us to live or what He wanted from us. I became confused. I was still alone. Now the church felt like the world, but I wanted to believe the church was different than the world.
So I began to search for a way to be more real. (How does one become more real? You either are or you aren’t.) I made choices all the time which I felt God wanted from me that weren’t popular in the Christian circles I was in. It was an effort to lay hold of a genuine thing rather than a fake.
But my loneliness grew. I gave birth to seven beautiful children. I had a loving husband. I had friends that agreed with me for the most part, but whom I rarely saw on a daily basis. I could not cross the barrier into real fellowship – the heart-to-heart kind. Anytime I tried there were lines drawn in each of us that we could not cross over.
Where was the presence of God? I knew He was alive, even that He was with me. But His presence wasn’t there. I wanted to be with Him in such a way that I’d be surrounded by Him, that I’d live in Him, that the atmosphere would be full of Him, that He’d be my environment, my surroundings. I longed for it. I had almost lost hope of ever seeing it.
And then one day I found it—just as surely as turning a corner and it was there. He put it in my path. It did not look like what I thought it would look like. It was made up of flawed people, but His presence was there. They lived, loved, and worked every day to make sure they didn’t offend Him so He wouldn’t be tempted to take it away.
By the time I had found them my thoughts were twisted. I had been so alone for so long and my mind was so weary that I would not have recognized Him—but my heart knew. My religious mind would have sent me back down a trail of being alone again and turning my back on them… but God gave me grace and I saw. And I never left again.
That was 16 years ago.
If I could have one wish, I think I would wish that the things I have seen the last 16 years could be published all over the world. I want everyone to experience the things I have experienced since living with these people. Every day I see God alive and well, living with His people. It is a full, full life. Full of Him—He is in His people.
And we’ve only begun.
There is a song we sing that God gave that describes what happened to me:
“I remember the emptiness, never knowing His presence,
And my heart overflows with gratefulness,
For now I am surrounded by the people of Yah.
And He is worth it all, my Lord, Yahshua;
You are worth it all;
No price too high—
Nothing will I seek, but to know you,
And to dedicate myself to the service of the One
Who is worth it all.”
Posted on Mar 6, 07:10 AM | Categorized under Articles—
