"...I Am So Lonely..."

Chances are if you're reading this, you have embraced the amazing technology available to us in the 21st century.  You check your Facebook wall every hour to see the latest posts from your 900 "friends". You text incessantly and may have even never used your phone to make a call.  You cruise the internet and file your favorite hairstyle or recipes on Pinterest.  You follow your favorite bloggers online and comment  on their posts.  You take vacations and immediately post your photos online using Instagram or Flickr.  Your home has multiple laptops to connect wirelessly to the cyberworld.  Wherever you go, you update your "followers" with the all the details on Twitter. You post your best videos on YouTube and Skype is a verb in your world.  You debate with your friends on the respective merits of the Iphone vs. the Droid.  In fact, you have moved beyond the capabilities of your phone and now carry an Ipad wherever you go, all the more easy to access and share the details of your life with your similarly connected cohorts.  To sum it up, every move and detail of your life is uploaded and instantly shared with others who are simultaneously doing the same.  And yet....Despite all these things, you are struck at times with a sense of sadness, a feeling of being adrift and isolated from others.  You feel small and inadequate..You feel lonely.

We all share the experience of feeling alone, questioning whether those around us truly care. What a strange sensation, to be more "connected" than any generation the world has ever seen and yet...  

And yet... feeling alone, we return to our computers and phones and seek even more diligently that which we have already discovered we will never find there.  We so desperately wish to escape this sense of brokenness that we attempt to bury it in "busyness" because in our idle time, we are unable to escape the knowledge that something is missing.  But what is it that we are looking for?

Scripture tells us that God placed eternity in the hearts of every man. A wise man called it a "God shaped hole in our hearts".  Oftentimes, our brokenness is a compass that points us towards  the only place where our souls can truly find rest.  We are indeed built for relationship, but we find ourselves looking to others to fulfill a need they were never intended to meet.  Instead of hiding our pain, our loneliness, we should recognize our need to run to his arms to find restoration...."He leads me beside still water. He restores my soul" Psalm 23:2..You see, long before Facebook and Twitter, God addressed our tendency to look to other things to fulfill a need only He could meet...“For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, The fountain of living waters, To hew for themselves cisterns, Broken cisterns That can hold no water."
Jeremiah 2:12-14

We indeed have a need to connect, a deep desire to feel as if we matter, to be loved.  None of our efforts to connect with others using whatever resources we have are inherently bad.  But all of our attempts to fill a God shaped hole with anything else will ultimately fail.  Our loneliness and longing, despite our best efforts to keep such feelings at bay, should serve as a reminder...but of what?  That  the God who created us has provided a path for us, a path that leads to " still waters", to the healing of our innermost hurts...To Him.

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
― C.S. Lewis