Being Alone

This past Thursday, I had business in Edmonton with a colleague who rode along on the way up. On the way back, I drove alone, and it was wonderful — like something you've missed desperately without realizing it.

To be sure, I've had my alone times each morning on my daily walk, but somehow the focus on listening to the lectures or sermons makes it a different sort of alone time. And also, there have been times alone in the house when no one else is there — physically, anyway. But somehow peoples' auras still remain behind in so many ways that one doesn't really get quite the same sense.

With all the activities surrounding my son's wedding this past weekend, and with so many other things before that, I have not had the opportunity for the times of aloneness that my soul seems to need — or is it that I have not disciplined myself to take such sabbath times? Whichever it is, I am sure that without the tradition of silence at the end of the Maundy Thursday service, and the periods of silence throughout the Good Friday service that we were able to attend at the local Anglican church, I may not have made it through these last weeks with my sanity intact.

This blog has been an obvious indicator of the lack of silence and aloneness in my life. I'm coming to realize that blogging — at least for me — is something that flows out of that sabbath alone time. The thoughts and reflections that run around in my head never properly gel otherwise — they remain just impressions, feelings, at best half-articulated ideas. So even when time and access to one of our computers is available, the capacity to get into the space of writing is simply not there.

Seen this way, perhaps struggles with the discipline of blogging, or journaling, is not so much a failure in and of itself, but rather a symptom of a failure to to maintain the discipline of sabbath — of wasting time on God, because He is worth more than the various and sundry other things that so absorb my time.

Of course, this raises the question, How then shall I rearrange my life to respond to this insight? That too may require some alone time.