Surrounded by Saints

 Immanuel

 

You're lonely, deep down,
So lonely, but none can tell,
Surrounded by Saints
Yet you feel like hell,
And the solution is, Well,
Well, well, well,
It's God with us;
It's Immanuel.

Cant get through this pain
Cant face this painful hour,
Cant take another minute,
It isn't in your power,
The solution is, Well,
Well, well, well,
It's God with us,
It's Immanuel,

No one understands
What you are going through
No one knows your estrangement,
No one feels like you do
But someone does, well,
Let me tell,
Tell,
Tell.
It's Jesus;
Our Immanuel.

Priceless presence with us,
This pearl within our shell,
The precious peace in whirlwind's eye,
It's too valuable to tell,
It's free to me, I cannot buy or sell,
Sell,
Sell,
It is God with me
Revealed to me,
My Immanuel

Reflection: Surrounded by Saints

To be lonely in a crowd is perhaps the worst kind of loneliness, compounded by all the poeple around you and yet somehow you feel disconnected. Everyone else is happy, it seems, just getting on with their lives, and you are cut adrift.

Add to this, if your crowd is a church, that these are believers who should love you. We are family, after all. Brothers and sisters. Christians can be salt. Unfortunately sometimes that can feel like salt in the wound.

This 'alone in a crowd' feeling inspired the lines:

Surrounded by Saints

Yet you feel like hell

And then include in the mix 'Christmas time', and it can bring you to toxic levels of despair.

I don't want to labour this point. My own experience with this is that often, my sense of rejection is self feeding. My behaviour is responding to a rejection that I am projecting onto others, and sometimes that causes me to spikey or hostile, which causes some genuine rejection, which in line with that confirms my bias and compounds my sense of loneliness. 

The good news is that this cycle is easily broken with the right mindset. As soon as you project warmth and start looking out for others, instead of focussing in your own need, you often find a warm reception because, guess what? We're all looking for love. 

The bad news is, it requires a change of mindset, and sometimes you are so deep in that funk you can hardly get your head up.

And that is where Jesus comes in.

Some of these poems were written in that same period of my life, some a few years apart, but this message of Immanuel seems to bridge them all.

Jesus is God with us. You are not alone. 

Ask for the strength to call on his name. Ask for the love for others.

I remember well, and have written before about a time where I was struggling with connections at Church. I would sit in a corner looking sour faced and deliberately not speak to people. I am just going to see, I would say to myself, how long it takes for someone to speak to me. And in the meantime I would watch others milling around. Many of them clearly looking a little lost and (possibly) for someone to speak to.

And then God opened my eyes. I was ignoring them. The very thing I wanted, I was denying others.

A quick bit of repentance saw an end to that.

Occasionally I slip back into the old mindset, but that lesson has set me in good stead for all kinds of social situations. And when I am fragile and don't engage, I can remember that this is a choice I am making. It can be changed.

~Scripture~

God sets the solitary in families; He brings out those who are bound into prosperity; But the rebellious dwell in a dry land.

~Psalm 68:6~

“Is this not the fast that I have chosen:

To loose the bonds of wickedness,

To undo the heavy burdens,

To let the oppressed go free,

And that you break every yoke?

7 

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,

And that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out;

When you see the naked, that you cover him,

And not hide yourself from your own flesh?

~Isaiah 58:6-7~