Throwing out messages in bottles:

It’s a cliche. It’s a metaphor floating on a current. Wave after wave, bobbing on the foamy seas, a lonely bottle with a message inside. It is a song. It is one of the hits from iconic 80’s band The Police, entitled “Message in a bottle”. The song’s theme is nothing new. It is something that every person on earth has struggled with. Not being marooned on a deserted island, but the feelings of total and utter loneliness. Everyone has experienced these feelings of loneliness and solitude. It doesn’t take a deserted island to feel this way, it just happens sometimes. Perhaps it manifests itself through forms of depression. Other times loneliness happens at the intersections of choice.

We find ourselves lonely even when in a crowded room. Loneliness creeps into the corners of the heart, weighing us down like an old roof on a buckled and bowing barn in an abandoned field. Eventually that barn is going to collapse. Eventually in this loneliness the roof caves in on us and we find ourselves casting these bottles into the seas so that someone, anyone might hear us and we will no longer be alone.

King David felt like this. He cast many “messages in bottles” when he composed psalms of prayers and desperations to God. In Psalm 142 David identifies the emotion of loneliness because he had been there, he had lived in the shadows of loneliness. “Look and see, there is no one at my right hand; no one is concerned for me. I have no refuge; no one cares for my life.” (Psalm 142:4) Yet there is wisdom here as well. He goes on to disclose the remedy for such moments of despair and desolation; “I cry to you, LORD; I say, “You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living.” (Psalm 142:5) David knew where his hope could be found even in the midst of his loneliness. Earlier in the same Psalm he says; “When my spirit grows faint within me, it is you who watch over my way. In the path where I walk people have hidden a snare for me.” (Psalm 142:3)

Are you casting out messages in bottles today? Are you alone in your troubles? Does it seem like the roof has caved in on your life and has pressed you down and crushed you by these burdens? Take comfort, take courage, because you are NOT alone! God is near and He will never leave you alone. When you cry out to Him, He will answer you.

-Just a thought for today