Remember you're not alone

After one of my dearest friends left her Midwestern home for a new job in the South last week, she told me, “Like all heralded adventures, this one is a mixed bag. The hills make driving difficult, the work is hard to finish between 8 and 5, and the apartment is solitary.” She said she felt as if she had gotten out of the shower on a cold night. “I wish someone would flip the heater on, or show up with a bigger, warmer towel. But as it is I’ll just have to stand here shivering and wait to warm up.”

Of course I wanted to hop in the car right away and sail southward to comfort her. Bound by grown-up duties of my own, I wrote her this letter instead:

Dear Friend,

I moved once, to a high-rise in Manhattan. I only stayed for three weeks, but it felt like a year. I was burnt out from college and petrified to go outside. My notebook served as the first witness to my loneliness. I wrote it all down—even the way my tears discolored the blue bed sheets of my precarious standard-issue bunk bed. I felt surrounded by strangers. I had a packed schedule, scarce sleep, and a breaking heart. I even experienced a sort of panic attack on that trip—waking up in the middle of a sleep cycle with a racing heart and nothing to comfort me but the foreign sounds from the alley outside.

Well—not nothing else to comfort me. Like many saints, I found the friendship of God in loneliness. My first diary entry reads: “Weary body, thirsty soul. God is with me! He is here. I feel Him in the longing.” My second: “Late night. God is my home. Must learn to listen to others. And—I MUST NOT TRY TO PROVE MYSELF.”

But I was trying to prove myself. I had gone to New York to study writing and complete an internship. I felt desperately aware of my own weakness. I wrote: “Whoever selects me as an employee will have merely impregnated themselves with disappointment. Need sleep. Need Jesus.”

When my mother asked me via Skype how I felt, I broke down weeping. My tears surprised even me. I couldn’t go forward and intern right away. I had to go home.

Later in my New York stint, I wrote, “May God lead me to a place of deep relationship. With Him, with others. For that is what matters. Not successes. I want the warm love and true knowing. Oh to deeply cherished and cared for. …”

A couple weeks later I received my first texts from my future husband, a man of deep care I had never expected. I was not watching him. But he was watching me.

So, dear friend, remember you’re not alone. God is with you. He has care cooked up for you—in ways you cannot see. You have lived with God for years and know this already. But sometimes there is health in hearing it again.

Warmer and bigger towels to you, Chelsea