A Face Lost in the Crowd

I am a face lost in the crowd... I am tempted to find myself in others... I drink from laughters with them. I suck, with excitement, the succulent juice of our togetherness. I walk and they call my name.

But suddenly, I seek retreat, an isolation. I want to be a stranger, a nobody. I want to feel stripped... ordinary...

And yet time doesn't permit me to have such moment. Such is the world that I live in. Lucky would I be to spend long hours doing this, musing - to some, doing nothing.

I walk with crowds but I am alone. My heart blends with theirs and we find a speech pitiful, we all cry. We laugh at a joke we all understand. And yet no one has a hint of what my soul is going through. Not one has known the complexity of my emotion, the struggle of my heart and the way that it battles with my mind.

I speak of words to some, but no one has heard the cries of my spirit - cries, I could not even make. Not that I can't trust them. I just think they wouldn't understand... There are some, I think who would. Where then is the soul that is ready? Open and kind to lend a listening heart...

I walk much visibly around many every day and yet people seem to have blinders...

I smile but that's all they see. I have something to say and there are many avenues to do so. But I could not shout it out for the world to hear. For hearing is different from understanding. And the latter is what I really need.

I am a face in the crowd, but my heart perceives no one. In my loneliness and confusion, it is only God I converse with...

They say no man is an island and they say to not be lonely is to reach out. But isn't reaching out the cause of my struggle? The very demand of my calling is the cause of my turmoil. Woe to me then? Will my brokenness forever be a stumbling block to my answering the call? Should I stop relating because sometimes relating is problematic?

I was called into relationships, but sometimes I doubt if I am merely filling a hole..

Indeed, I perceive a hole in my soul and often, I get tempted to fill it with people. Relationships with them, I found, would never fit.. This hole, I realized has a shape. It is God-shaped. Unless I ask God to fill it with his very self, people will only be "fillers" in my life, and not "receivers" of the abundant grace God intends to give them, through me.

I muse now and realize if I am to love people, they are to be recipients of God's blessings through my life and not "instruments" to fill my soul with a hole, echoing with longing - a soul with a hole He alone could fill.

- JCR / January 10, 2011