One Is the Loneliest Number

Our four oldest children share a room with each other: one bunk bed and two toddler beds. Adjacent to their room is a very small, oddly shaped guest room (or more appropriately, as Lily calls it, the "guess" room -- you never know what might be stored in there!). Since the twins moved out of that room and into Ben and Lily's room 7 months ago, I have been waiting for a certain someone to ask if he could sleep in the guest room. He finally asked this week.

  

And lasted all of MAYBE seven minutes, if I really stretch out how long it took him to climb back into his top bunk. As he was walking back to his room, his stuffed dinosaur under one arm and a blanket under the other, he muttered, "I'm going back to my bed." When I asked him what was wrong, he sheepishly said, "I'm lonely in there."

  

I knew exactly how he felt, and I was reminded of a birthday breakfast my mom prepared for me to have in bed one year. I was so lonely eating that breakfast in bed that I ended up downstairs with the others in a matter of minutes.

  

I'm all for silence...occasionally...but it is wonderful when the constant mayhem of siblings is a comfort, when those who know how to most distress you are also those to best soothe you.

  

In Psalm 68, the psalmist says, "God sets the lonely in families..." How often I forget this and view "family" in the strictest technical terms. We are more than just people who share a last name; we are together because God set us together!

   

And I am ashamed when I remember that I should view my church family in the same light. We are more than just people who share a bulletin; we are together because God set us together! Like Benjamin with his siblings, I should be anxious for the times when we can be together. I should feel lonely when I am apart from the Body. And I should rest and rejoice when I am together with the Body, not because it's a perfect Body, but because Christ is the Head.

  

Like the psalmist, I need to remember:

"I lie awake;
   I am like a lonely sparrow on the housetop...
My days are like an evening shadow;
   I wither away like grass. "
(Ps. 102: 7,11)   

 

BUT!!! 

"Let this be recorded for a generation to come,
   so that a people yet to be created may praise the LORD:
that he looked down from his holy height;
   from heaven the LORD looked at the earth,
to hear the groans of the prisoners,
   to set free those who were doomed to die,
that they may declare in Zion the name of the LORD,
   and in Jerusalem his praise,
when peoples gather together,
   and kingdoms, to worship the LORD. "
(Ps. 102:18-22)