Hmm mm mm

Here it again, the piercing loneliness.  My roommate is gone, but that's not why I feel lonely.  In fact, I feel pretty good.  Having the place to myself is, well, I feel like I am safe again.  It's just me, the boys, my kitchen, my music, thoughts...

A weekend away was nice.  Now that I am back in this place again, my place, it's time to face the world alone again.  Perhaps the self-pity is a disguise for self-importance and elevation.  Perhaps that's why I feel like I need to put down my thoughts on cyberspace where I know some people may stumble upon them and ponder upon them.  

My heart will always be lonely until it belongs.  I know, that I belong to Jesus, and He is always with me.  Maybe loneliness is the cross that I will have to bear, as Jesus also felt lonely.  In my dream last night I was getting married.  I wasn't ready at all, I didn't have a veil.  It was the rehearsal and the groom to be told me he was tired and he was going to go home now.  I was standing upon that stage in front of the main sanctuary when I turned around and saw my own smiling face.  Then I realized it was my dad, with his big smile the way he smiled when you knew he was genuinely happy.  When was the last time that I missed my dad?  I can't remember.  My dream told me that I must do.  That night we had spent an hour in Powell's books, a humongous bookstore in Portland.  I came across "The Historian" and gasped with excitement when I realized that's the book my dad told me to read.  He said it was great, and he told me this when I was feeling lonely and depressed and needed someone to just be there.  I thought of how lonely it must have been for him all those years we lived in Vancouver.  And I laid in bed thinking about the trip home, when I would become not a unit but by myself again, I wept because I never understood how hard it must have been for my dad.

I am reading Barbara Brown Taylor's "An Altar in the World", in which she talks about all the ways we can experience God in our mundane, daily lives.  I am enjoying it immensely.  This loneliness, while it stings and it nags and it plagues me, while it puts me in a state of melancholy, it has made my understanding of the world deeper.  Maybe this is an Altar of mine, bringing me closer to Jesus, and closer to the hearts of those I love.