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SO, I have succumbed to bloglessness during the past many and very busy months.  The absence has allowed me the time to marry a wonderful young man as well as complete my third year of medical school successfully.  Doubtless, you shall want to know more about all of this . . . and I’ll tell you, but not all at once, and not today.  You’ll have to come back to hear those wonderful tales.

Today I wish to talk about something that plagues my life currently, and perhaps it plagues yours too.  It is the state of being alone, yet surrounded at the same time.  You can see it in the eyes of someone succumbing to pancreatic cancer – they are surrounded by friends, family, medical professionals, and yet they remain alone, the only one to be invaded by the cancer.  The closer I get to leaving for the mission field, the more I see it in the eyes of long-term missionaries . . . they are often in churches, surrounded by God’s kind people, and yet their eyes reflect stories of long spans of time spent in places where there are not such churches, where poverty and godlessness are life.  I see it in some married people’s eyes – so close in space to their spouse and yet so misunderstood.  Alone but together is a way of life for many.

I bemoan, sometimes in a not-at-all-godly attitude, the transient lifestyle that God has called me too.  No sooner am I settling into a place when God calls me elsewhere.  This is that sort of year – I’m finishing my 4th year of medical school, preparing to move to residency, which will necessitate finding a new apartment, a new church, a new circle of friends, etc.  And being a newly-wed, I am meeting and greeting many new people in my husband’s (now ours!) church and even wider circle of friends.   He encourages me to reach out and build on the friendship offered to me.  I find myself holding back, weary of investing in friendships, only to leave them behind in a few short months.  I’m tempted to accept the “alone, yet together” way of living.

I pause to reflect on Jesus Christ and how He must have felt, even as He was tempted in every way in which we have been.  If anyone felt alone and yet together, it must have been Him.  He was surrounded almost constantly by people who must have thought they understood Him, but nearly always failed to recognize Him as the Son of God He was.  Yet He invested in the lives of those around Him, even if He was just passing through the town. 

And so, even as I am purposing to do, I encourage you to imitate Christ, and invest in the lives of those around you, even as you feel alone in the midst of a crowd.  Shrink not back from the pain of giving without being understood.  Remember He who gave all!

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