Alone – Lamentations 1:16

This is why I weep over my plight,
why tears stream from my eyes:
because any who might comfort me and renew my strength
are far away from me;
my children have become desolate,
for the enemy is victorious.

(Lamentations 1:16, REB)

“Aloneness” has different meanings to different people.

I’m an introvert. This doesn’t mean I don’t like people, but social events are tiring for me. I particularly dislike social events that don’t have a program. Being expected to make small talk, or to show interest in random topics, makes me want to run and hide.

My wife has said that at a party, she assumes I’ll find a chair in a corner and tune out the scene.

So there is a positive sense to being alone, alone to think, alone to plan, alone to rest. Alone by choice.

Then there is the aloneness that is the result of abandonment. When things start going wrong you find out quickly who cares and who doesn’t. People forget you exist because you’re no longer involved in what is important to them from day to day. There is a descending spiral, as you seem too anxious and needy when a visitor does appear. They may not have the energy to fill the loneliness in your heart.

We tell others that there is no friend like Jesus. Yet sometimes we need the physical person in the room. “When I was in prison, you visited me,” says Jesus in Matthew 25:36. As Jesus often does, he reverses the situation as we see it. We’re thinking of seeing Jesus in the person who is visiting. I need a little encouragement from a real human, that physical person. But here Jesus is telling people what a good thing they did when the visited Him, Jesus, in prison.

When did that happen? When the visited the person who is alone. When you did it for the least, the most insignificant, the least lovely. It’s not even limited to those unjustly in prison. When you visited the least important person in prison. Even if they fully deserved to be there.

I follow my meditations when writing about these passages, and the meditations can go quite far afield. I want to bring this back to Judah and the exile, which underlies the text. Their country is destroyed. They have not friends. Potential friends only see targets and victims. Nobody is there to help because all those who were friends are destroyed or driven away. Judah is devastated and alone.

And yet …

They are still God’s people. We see this book preserved about mourning and lament, and we see the devastation, and restoration, partial though it appears. And we can look at this from the other side. What do you and I do about devastation? Do we ignore it and hope it doesn’t come to us? Or do we seek to change it?

As I think about this, I’m drawn away from my own attitude about aloneness and I’m led to ask myself how often I visit someone who is shut in. How often do I encourage someone who is discouraged? How often is my voice raised in defense of the weak, the hopeless, the victims? Do I care even for those whose problems seem to be of their own making?

I was talking to one of my authors recently and he told me he was headed to the Mexican border, where he would pray for refugees who were waiting there. He couldn’t even get to touch them, but he could pray, and he did.

So what will I do for those who, to the world, are insignificant? What will you do?