Loneliness
Edward D Lacey
There is a type of loneliness that no one told me about. It has been the saddest and hardest kind of loneliness that I've ever had to deal with. I call it pastoral loneliness, but it doesn’t only apply to pastors . As a businessman for 20 years, I often heard leaders of various organizations and groups talk about how lonely it is at the top. This secular world malady is similar to pastoral loneliness. It is lonely to watch person after person blaze a path that leads to destruction. It is lonely to watch good people engaging in attitudes and lifestyles that are un-Christian. It is lonely to feel like you are the only person (like Elijah running from Jezebel) who cares about the spiritual lives of your congregation. (I know more people in our congregations care, and maybe that’s just my pride talking.)
No one prepared me for this type of loneliness, and no one could have prepared me for it.
Praise God, the Holy Spirit has comforted me in such times of loneliness, like no other friend could do. I've learned to lean more and more on Him in each succeeding year in my ministry. Time and again, I was driven to my knees out of a desperate dependence on God. Then, I finally learned that He alone can change the hearts of people. He alone can bring conviction, and He alone deserves the honor the glory and the praise.
The job of a pastor is lonely and sad, and well it should be, for if it was not, I would become to full of myself, too puffed up with pride. This job has to be lonely because only in our times of extreme loneliness and sadness do we learn how to utterly depend on God to supply all our needs.
Psalm 23:1 reads, “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.” He supplies all my needs.
E. Davis Lacey
WEB: www.fetchitation.com <http://www.fetchitation.com/>
BLOG: www.fetchitation.wordpress.com <http://www.fetchitation.wordpress.com/>
TWITTER: @EDL2