Psalm 25:16-18

Turn thou to me, and be gracious to me; for I am lonely and afflicted.
Relieve the troubles of my heart,
and bring me out of my distresses.
Consider my affliction and my trouble,
and forgive all my sins.

Everybody has felt the way the psalmist in today’s verses feels.  As children, we all knew what it was to feel as though we hadn’t a friend in the world.  As teenagers, we all struggle with rejection and isolation from time to time.  And as adults, there are moments in all our lives when the very thought of getting out of bed to face yet another day is almost more than we can bear.  And the hardest part of it all is the feeling that no one else can comprehend what we are going through: that, as hard as they try, the ones we love and need most will only be able to call to us from across a great chasm since they have never known the suffering we know. The great blessing of our faith is that it rescues us from this temptation to indulge in the sense of Isolated Tragic Grandeur (that is, pride) that can cut us off from help when we are suffering the most.  There is, quite literally, nothing we are suffering, no matter how horrible, that God himself has not suffered in his own flesh and blood.  Betrayal, hunger, loneliness, fear, physical pain, the temptation to despair, abandonment by God and man, and death — all these were known by Jesus Christ.  So turned to him in your suffering in the confidence that he will neither rebuke nor be aloof from your pain.  He’s been there and he knows the way out.