THE LONELY ROAD

 

 

I am facing Christ Day alone this year. I experienced this in 2022. Circumstances dictated I would have no family, friends, gifts or festivities to focus on.

I was ok with it. In fact, I looked forward to it resolving it would be the most spiritual Christmas of all: Church, intense study of the Saviour’s life, listening to Handel’s Messiah, watching Passion of the Christ. I was going to have the greatest connection to the Saviour yet.

Christmas Day came and found me in bed sick with a heavy head cold, too sick and unmotivated to carry out my good intentions. My aloneness and the state of being, however, gave me more insight than all the planned inspiration that never eventuated.

As I faced the day alone without any distractions, a vista of Christ’s life presented itself to my mind from the humble and unceremonious birth to the horror of Golgotha and Calvary, and in between I saw….loneliness.

This is what I came to understand: the lonely road that the Saviour travelled whilst here would have been fraught with longing for what He had left behind…….something nobody else could understand with their mortal, finite minds.

Even though some believed Him to be the Son of God and supported Him, they would never have understood what it meant to leave His throne; they would have never understood the glimpses He had into eternal worlds He could not speak of; they would have never related to the higher ground He stood on; and they would never have grasped the agony awaiting Him.

In short, the Saviour travelled a lonely road. One, in fact, paved with many tears. It is true that once He had full knowledge of who He was, He would have had Father’s comforting spirit and the company of angels, nevertheless, these moments of reprieve must have made His feelings of isolation even more acute once they were withdrawn. The thought that comes to mind: so close, yet so far.

I do know one thing. The Saviour would have yearned for His true home whilst He walked this primitive earth. He would have yearned for the constant presence of the Father He so loved. The eternal life with Him that awaited Him would have been more of a reality to Him than mortality. 

When we come to the stage in our lives where this world becomes less of a ‘reality’ and the prospect of the eternal becomes what is more real, we get a glimpse of the Saviour’s mortal life. This is the point where the longing for the Father’s presence sets in.

It is the moment to live for, because then we leave the world behind do everything necessary to make it back home. We abandon sin and we seek Christ’s living water that gives us life and power of endurance. We abandon the enticing lustre of this world and yearn for the God who awaits us…..

Did you miss Your godly robes

That you traded for

The swaddling cloths of Calvary?

Was the ground rough beneath

Your feet as You traversed

The dust of Galilee?

The baseness of This earth,

So willingly suffered despite hostility.

Yet, You came:

The Father to reveal

And to Him forever

Our yielding hearts to seal.

- CATHRYNE ALLEN 

(Art: Jerusalem O Jerusalem by Greg Olsen)