Before meeting my wife, I had several lonely years. The loneliness was painful and I didn't know how to deal with it. When I look back on those years, I wish I could have understood that to feel loneliness is not a sign of failure. Sometimes I felt my faith had failed. Should I feel alone while "walking with Jesus?" Sometimes I felt God had failed me, when yet another potential romance ended. I knew I was timid in potential relationships, but I felt I had reached out, so why hadn't one of those worked?
If I could go back in time, I'd tell my earlier self to read Psalm 22; and realize it is not just a prediction of Jesus' suffering on the cross, but a real moment in David's life when he felt alone and cried out to God. He was not losing his faith, he was faithfully presenting to God his feelings of loneliness. God is with us, even when we don't have what we want, even when what we want is a good thing.
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