Never Alone

Is this how you experience it? When you are well, and things are going well, it frees your mind to attend to all kinds of things. You can get things done, run-down topics that have you curious, pray, or just let your mind wander. But when there is trouble, when you are suffering, all of your attention is drawn strongly to the misery. We focus there, either for a solution, or simply because we can think of nothing else. Circumstantial, psychological, or physical pain can be isolating because there is no one else in it like you are. With all your focus going there, the pain is all that seems present with you.

All suffer in life. Not to the same degree, but all suffer. One of the figures of the New Testament who suffered varieties of misery was Paul, the bearer of the Gospel to multiple regions of the Roman Empire. He sought in his vocation to proclaim the good news and form communities committed to Christ. In carrying this out, imprisonment, beatings, stoning, the natural elements, and treachery enveloped him at times. It is surprising to find he wrote not about being alone in his suffering but to have experienced the inextinguishable presence of Christ and the love of God throughout all ordeals.

In his Epistle to the Romans, he gave us all a stirring promise nothing in all the world will ever drive a wedge between the believer and Christ. Nothing that can happen will separate us from the central reality of existence:

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, ‘For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:35-39)

We get the sense, reading his letter he is not promoting an exercise in stoic mental persistence but a divine mystery. Paul knew the mystical presence of Christ. Jesus, risen from the dead, had appeared to him at his conversion. Paul knew that presence of Jesus within every circumstance, no matter how gripping and harsh.

He claimed this wondrous connection with divine life not as his alone, but as the sure promise for everyone in Christ. God comes as Love to dwell with us and stay with us come what may. You see how he says that nothing whatsoever in all the universe shall separate us from that love. It is not a sentiment, you understand, not a feeling. Love itself, Love personified, remains with us. Count on it, speak of it; encounter the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. You will never be alone. Indeed, the abiding presence of God will be that which brings you through all things even the most frightening and painful difficulties. Take heart. You will never be alone.