Quote for Today

“The loneliness of the Christian results from his walk with God in an
ungodly world, a walk that must often take him away from the
fellowship of good Christians as well as from that of the unregenerate
world.

   His God-given instincts cry out for companionship with others of his
kind, others who can understand his longings, his aspirations, his
absorptions in the love of Christ; and because with his circle of friends
there are few who share his inner experiences, he’s  forced to walk alone.

   The unsatisfied longings of the prophets for human understanding caused
them to cry out in their complaint, and even our Lord himself suffered in
the same way.

   The man (or woman) who has passed on into the divine Presence in actual
inner experience will not find many who understand him. He finds few
who care to talk about that which is the supreme object of his interest, so
he is often silent and preoccupied in the midst of noisy religious shoptalk.

   For this he earns the reputation of being dull and over-serious, so he is
avoided, and the gulf between him and society widens. He searches for the
friends upon whose garments he can detect the smell of myrrh and aloes
and cassia out of the ivory palaces, and finding few or none, he, like Mary
of old, keeps these things in his heart.

   It is this very loneliness that throws him back upon God. His inability to find
human companionship drives him to seek in God what he can find nowhere
else.”

A.W. Tozer