I woke up this morning feeling extra lonely, and since I had some free time, I decided to check in with Jesus for a bit.
{Oh. Great. Here goes this girl who drinks too much and cusses too much and falls way too hard for the wrong kind of people and she's about to start preaching. What's she know about God? Scrolling on, now.}
Wait, though. Hear me out. Please?
Chances are, if you're anything at all like me, you spend way too much of your life feeling like you're unworthy of God's grace. Even if you're nothing like me, you probably felt lonely at some point, too. Or maybe you feel like God is a character who was made up to make people like me feel better. If you're a really put-together Christian or a really messed up Christian or even you're not a Christian at all, that's okay. You don't have to believe that Christ was the Son of God, that he was sent by some holy presence to save us from our sinful ways, that he was crucified to redeem humanity. Forget all of that, and just read what I'm about to tell you like it's a regular old story in a regular old book about a regular old guy who experienced some really shitty things in his life. Sound familiar? K, good.
Back to waking up. I was lonely. So I looked up verses about loneliness, and I ended up in the book of Matthew (chapters 26 and 27 if you wanna follow along).
Little background story for you: There's a guy named Jesus and he's a teacher. But he's kind of radical and some people are down with his ideas but a LOT of people aren't. He hangs out with raunchy, sick, ugly, and poor people and says that they're cool. He does all kinds of magic tricks to convince people to like him. He challenges people in power and people who don't share. He says hippy things like Love your neighbor as you want to be loved. And he likes wine. You can see why the weirdos love him and everybody else is looking for a way to bring him down a notch. He has friends though, and this group of twelve students who follow him around all the time. And one night they have this big dinner and he drops some heavy truth bombs on them. He's gonna die in two days. And he's gonna die because one of them is going to turn him in to the government. AND HE CALLS THAT DUDE OUT, YALL. (According to the book, everyone just keeps on eating and drinking like he didn't just say "Hey, Judas. You're gonna get me killed in a couple days, bruh.")
Anyway. Fast forward and here we are in the book of Matthew, chapter 26. Jesus and his bros are hanging around outside and it hits him. This is it. He's about to die. And it's gonna hurt. And his friends are gonna ditch him and betray him. And there's nothing he can do about any of it. So he's like... yall. Can you come take a walk with me? And I know it's late but can you just stay awake and pray with me and comfort me? Because I'm getting a little scared. So they go for a walk and when Jesus turns around to say something, his dudes are passed the hell out. They literally just like quit walking with him and fell asleep. So Jesus wakes their asses up and he's like YOU HAD ONE JOB, FRIENDS.
Now we've come to the verse I didn't even know I was searching for this morning:
He said to them, "My soul is OVERWHELMED with sorrow to the point of DEATH. Stay here and keep watch with me."
Then he literally lays face down on the ground, crying out to God, BEGGING Him to reroute his path and change his fate. Jesus is so terrified and lonely and desperate, he wants to die before they can kill him. Or he wants God to change what the prophets have predicted. He wants ANYTHING but to be betrayed by his best friends and beaten by soldiers and crucified by strangers.
SPOILER ALERT: God doesn't answer his cries for mercy. They catch Jesus and strip him naked and humiliate him and beat him up and murder him. But the book goes on to show how Jesus rose above all of that (no, literally, like he came back to life and rose up into the heavens and lived happily ever after).
I think the moral I'm taking from this story today is that there is LIFE after LONELY. And we ALL feel lonely. (Which, ironically enough, makes me feel... less lonely?) We all have moments where we feel terrified of what's coming next. Moments when someone we love betrays us in an unimaginable way. Moments where the hurt is so deep, actually DYING seems a better option than actually LIVING in that depth of pain. But if we can accept that sometimes life is shitty and there are going to be those unbearable moments that leave us crying out for some kind of mercy but we really will feel relief again one day some day... if we can just get through those awful, horrible times, we will RISE again.
That's all I got for yall today.
