My Crashing Heart.

I occasionally get hit with this intense feeling of loneliness and pain. I don't mean to be dramatic or anything. From time to time, it feels like my heart is crashing through my chest, breaking my ribs, and the splintered bones pierce it until it stops working. My soul is longing for connection to another soul. I don't mean this to sound that Christ isn't sufficient, because I know He is. But as Bono once sang, "I still haven't found what I'm looking for". I see through a mirror dimly, and this pain is real. It's odd, because I don't know where it comes from. Maybe it's a spiritual attack from a demonic force; or perhaps its the bubbling out of the darkness from within my darkened heart. Maybe it's both.
Last week at the Village's college gathering, Matt Younger taught from Matthew 21, where Jesus triumphantly enters into Jerusalem. Messiah fever was a pitch, and the crowds began to yell "Hosanna in the highest!" "Hosanna" literally means "save us". The Jews were wanting to be saved from their current situation, to have the Romans toppled with a Davidic kingship reestablished with Jesus at the head. But Jesus knew that to do this was to take of a symptom, not the core issue of the problem of their diaspora. The Jews had no home because their hearts were far from God. They shouted "Hosanna" for a temporary relief; Jesus gave them an eternal one: Himself.
This is my heart, as well. "Hosanna in the highest!" is my anthem, but why do I declare? I long to be connected to deeply to another soul. I have friends, good ones, and best ones, at that. But Jesus, in His graciousness and sweetness, has pulled back another blackened layer to my soul and it is this: I am scared to allow people in. I am terrified that if they do, they will hate what they see and want to jet. It becomes this vicious cycle where I desire this type of connection, but since I'm scared of it, I don't attempt to try for it. Hence, waves of loneliness wash over me, drowning me in their severity and slowly seeping the air from my lungs.
I don't think I am being whiny or a baby. If I am, I seek your counsel and rebuke. We were made for connection to one another. And not the shallow, surface-level style of connections that permeate our culture like a virus. I write all this for a main reason: it is cathartic for me. And secondly, perhaps this is your struggle too. We are the loneliest people to ever step forth on the earth. Our society and way of life thrusts us into large groups of people but we're horrendously lonely and alone. Maybe I am being dramatic, and my feelings of the fact that people don't care for me aren't real. I watched Lars and the Real Girl this weekend, and Lars believed that no one cared for him. But everyone did. Maybe that's me.