At four years old I remember feeling lonely. My mother was over forty when I was born and was not eager to roll on the floor with a rambunctious child. Being armed with an active imagination, I created a unisex friend to fill in what was missing until a real friend came along. And one did. Across the street and two houses south, I found a friend. For the next ten years we wondered, explored, and tested our little universe together.

I know you have experienced loneliness. Our abilities to rise above the tragedies, stresses, and the mundane challenge us. Where innocence once played, the past and future now consume our thoughts. We find ourselves in a place of loneliness without knowing how to change it.

I took a thousand trips to despair, and countless years of visiting Lonely’s house before I learned I was not alone. Everything came together when I realized how I was feeling was not the truth. It was an outright lie. How I felt was seldom the truth, and only part of a revelation of my reality. To find out there had been a friend with me the whole time as well as an enemy setting off smoke bombs in front of me changed how I viewed my existence. Not only how I perceived it but how I now live.

Have you encountered the sleazy supposed artist with the black paintbrush? He paints your sunlit windows with darkness to block out dancing butterflies and bright blue skies with billowy white clouds. He makes you “feel” alone, ugly and without hope.

Learn to play with your real Friend. Jesus wants to explore a different world with you than the one where you have been living. Are you looking for the joy of a real friend? Then you are looking for Jesus.

1 Samuel 12:22For the sake of his great name the LORD will not reject his people, because the LORD was pleased to make you his own.