Greetings, John and Doves!  The following from A. W. Tozer

may have already been posted here but I felt led to post

it again.  There are so many of us feeling discouraged

because of the rejection we receive from our families,

friends, and even some of our brothers and sisters in

Christ because we are all longing, watching and waiting

for our precious Lord's coming for us in the clouds of

heaven.

 

An Excerpt from

The Loneliness of the Christian

by A. W. Tozer
 

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 absorption in the love of Christ; and because within his circle of friends there are so few who share his inner experiences he is 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 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."

http://www.crossroad.to/Bible_studies/sermons/devotions/loneliness.htm