1989 July/August issue Part 1

The gift of loneliness

I was not a wife anymore. I was a widow. Another assignment. Another gift. 

   Don’t imagine or a moment that that was the thought that occurred to me the instant the word came. O Lord, was probably all I could think, stunned as we all were.

   One step at a time over the years, as I sought to plumb the mystery of suffering (which cannot be plumbed), I began to see that there is a sense in which everything is a gift, even my widowhood. I hope I can explain.

   There would be no widowhood if there were no death. The Bible calls death an enemy. There would be no divorce if there were no sin. Sin is enmity against God. When sin entered the world through what theologians call the Fall of Man, death and all kinds of suffering followed.

   But God still loves us. This we know, for the Bible tells us. C.S. Lewis wrote, “You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the ‘lord of terrible aspects,’ is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds” (The Problem of Pain, New York, Macmillan, 1965, p.35).

   That inexorable Love had allowed me to become a widow. But “allowed me to become” is not adequate. It even seems feeble to me now, for the Lord of hosts is absolutely sovereign. He holds power over the universe, He holds authority over my life- not because He usurps the rights with which He endowed me in creation, but because I had specifically asked Him to be Lord of my life. I had prayed as earnestly as a child and a teenager and a woman can pray, Thy will be done. The coming of this transcendent authority into one’s life is bound to be an active thing, an immense disruption at times.

   This was one of those times. He had done more than merely “allow” a thing to “happen” to me. I do not know any more accurate of putting it than to say that He had given me something. He had given me a gift- widowhood.

   How can I say such a thing?

   He does not whisk us at once to Glory. We go on living in a fractured world, suffering in one way or another the effects of sin- sometimes our own- sometimes others’. Yet I have come to understand even suffering, through the transforming power of the Cross, as a gift, for in this broken world, in our sorrows, He gives us Himself; in our loneliness He comes to meet us.

   In His death Jesus Christ gave us life. The willingness of the Son of God to commit Himself into the hands of criminals became the greatest gift ever given- the Bread of the world, in mercy broken. Thus the worst thing that ever happened became the best thing that ever happened.

- Excerpt from my book Loneliness.