Friends, Family, Brothers, Sisters,

I am sorry that I have not been present to offer encouragement. I cannot say little else for the selfish behavior on my part, as I know I have had time where I could have said something, and did not, in the case of many friends I have.

I have been through almost debilitating lows of loneliness in the past week, and I know I am not the only one who suffers. It has reached a point that while I will not allow my sorrow to make me incapable of functionality, I live in a state of sadness or expectation of it. That our Savior has suffered with us in loneliness is something that is in part comforting to me, and I hope is consoling to you. Jesus never married. He never had a girlfriend, never had a significant other. He was alone. He was born alone, to live alone, to die alone separated from the Father.

I told my friend Brady a few days ago that I couldn't imagine living that long and never having a romantic relationship. I told him I would have gone insane, because my desire for family and romantic love is so strong. Christ not only lived for 33 years as a single man, but as a single man knowing that he had no hope of having that companionship that men and women were meant to have from the beginning. Christ never had that gift and knew it would not be there for him all along. Could a mere person live with such a defined and irrefutable truth of something he would lack his whole life? That what your kind was supposed to have would never come to you?

I have a new way to be in awe of my Savior. It is that as I am now, in my sorrowful condition, Christ was his whole life on this Earth. He knew the groaning loneliness of our hearts. And unlike us, he knew that the Lord had no plans to assuage it. Christ fell at Calvary, his life a wasted ruin to the world. And yet he rose victorious as a king of all, who has triumphed over everything. Christians, too, shall rise victorious and with unmatched joy, in our own time.

We do not suffer in vain. We suffer because the Lord has called us to take up the splintered cross and follow him into the crucible. Through pain and sorrow. I have resisted sin last night, and have gained nothing for it. But Christ did not call us to resist sin so that we may have gains of our world, of our condition here, but gains in the Kingdom. That is where I know my gains must be. If my gains are bought with tears, with sleepless nights, with anguish of my soul, then so be it. I will refuse to curse the name of my Lord for lacking unnecessary love I desire. I will refuse to let my desires lead me into slaking my thirst with anything other than the living waters that have been given to me. I will refuse to let my sorrows burden others, nor my troubles cause others to stumble. My Lord hears my cry.

Come with Jesus, to the Place of the Skull, Golgotha, where he lost everything. We have lost everything already. Look at your life in earnest. What have you gained? What is there that you have that cannot be torn from your hands? What smiles do we bear that never turn downward? What will follow you beyond the veil of death? Who loves you who will not return to dust and love you no more? What fellowship do you have that will never disband? What convenient philosophies of life do you have that do not yield to the relentless advance of mortality? If all things we can have here fall out of our hands and wither away regardless of what WE do, let us forget about trying to gain them back and look toward our Lord's victory at hand.

Though I walk in pain, I will not turn aside.

Eternity looms, and there is a knock at your door. Answer, and let the Lord enter.