For many, the holidays can bring on a sense of loneliness and isolation. But this need not be so.
Many advisors today encourage looking at each moment of each day to find reasons to be grateful.
Often, though, it takes a stronger anchor than positive thinking to break through loneliness. An approach that recognizes a divine Love and power always with us can actually heal loneliness and make our holidays rich and joyful.
In the Bible’s book of Romans, the apostle Paul defines our unbreakable relationship with divine Love: “For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” In fact, biblical heroes such as Job, Elijah, David, and Jesus found that times of isolation afforded the opportunity to develop a deeper relationship with God. And through divine comfort and inspiration, resolution and healing followed.
This healing comfort and inspiration are available today and are just as effective now as then. In the December 25, 2000, Christian Science Sentinel, Betty Garner shared her own story of overcoming years of holiday-induced loneliness and depression. Inspired by Christ Jesus’ instantaneous healing of the paralyzed man who had been waiting 38 years by the pool of Bethesda (John 5:1-17), she realized her own sense of hopelessness and isolation, especially at the holidays, paralleled his. “I felt such great compassion for that man at the pool,” she wrote, “and knew that like him, I could feel the touch of the healing Christ…When I saw that my spiritual identity had always been with God, who is divine Love, I understood that I’d been made spiritually whole and complete. The feeling of depression and isolation lifted, and it has never returned.”
How can such freedom come so easily? In her textbook on healing, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy shares a promise of the gentle healing power that comes with affirming our present union with Love. “The wintry blasts of earth may uproot the flowers of affection, and scatter them to the winds; but this severance of fleshly ties serves to unite thought more closely to God, for Love supports the struggling heart until it ceases to sigh over the world and begins to unfold its wings for heaven.”
Embracing our spiritual unity with divine Love can buoy us up above all sorts of stressful and/or depressing situations. By drawing nearer to God, we can experience the very basic message of Christ–Immanuel, or God with us. In feeling His tender care and expressing more gratitude, we can find freedom from loneliness and joyfully anticipate good in each holiday activity this season.
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