Quick question – what is God telling you right now?  What is He working on in you, what God dream are you pursuing, and what is He calling you to?  I suggest you should be able to answer in less time than it takes me to write this.   If your answer was quick and easy, keep pressing on.  If not, keep reading.

Follow up question – when is the last time you were alone?  Before you answer, let me give you my definition of being alone.  Alone is just you.  No social media, no games on your phone, actually, no phone period.  It’s really rare to be that kind of alone anymore.  I saw a statistic that over 90% of people are never farther than 6 feet from their phone 365 days a year.  The phone and social media is our new way to be connected.  Many of us have hundreds of “friends” on facebook.  If you’re cool and hip, you live on snapchat. By the way, what’s your longest snapchat streak?

Honestly, I’m not here to bash social media, my point is that I believe being alone is necessary to being a Christ follower, and that it’s hard to do, doing so requires being intentional about it.

As a Christ follower, we are called to do what He did, and pattern our lives after His.  The disciples followed Him around to do just that, they ate what He ate, slept where He slept, and literally walked in His footsteps.  Then, after the resurrection, they set off down the path He had spent 3 years modeling for them.   During that time, one of the recurring patterns in the life of Christ was for Him to be alone.  The first example that comes to mind is the forty days in the desert that included an encounter with Satan.  Other examples – “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.” Mark 1:35. “Jesus went out to a mountain side to pray, and spent the night praying to God. When morning came, he called his disciples to him.” Luke 6:12-13.  “After his brothers had gone up to the feast, then [Jesus] also went up, not publicly but in private.” (John 7:10, ESV).  Jesus walked 90 miles from Galilee to Jerusalem, which gave him about five days in solitude.  I could go on and on with examples, but you get the point.

Why is being alone so critical?  Christ used the time to pray, to connect with His father, to prepare for the road ahead of Him.

So back to my question, when was the last time you were alone?  Alone with your thoughts, alone with Christ, alone and doing some soul searching?  Even when we are by ourselves, we are usually not alone.  When is the last time you prayed for more than 5 minutes?  How about thirty minutes?  The 2 minute daily devotional (on our phone) is great, but what about real time spent in the bible?  I love that someone said the ultimate purpose of facebook will be to prove that we did indeed have enough time to do all that we were called to do in this world.

Being alone is critical to understand, define, and build your foundation, your core.  So much of our life is focused on how to do more, achieve more, become more, earn more and so on.  Christ calls us to be less focused on the world, and more focused on Him.  The bible talks about Christ followers having peace and rest.  Those are spiritual places of quiet.  The stillness of the soul, and the keeping of kingdom perspective requires stepping away from the world and being still and quiet.  And quiet requires being alone.

I challenge you, and me, to learn to be alone in a good way.  Learn to examine yourself, to know yourself, to be honest with yourself, and then come to like yourself.  These things can only be done by a focused and solitary pursuit of them.  They are too fragile to exist in the press of life or the company of others.  But the very fragility of them reveals how precious and rare they are, and therefore how critical they are to draw near to God.

I started this by asking what is God telling you right now, and if you had any questions about that, I suggest it may be time to be alone and be with God.  Be in His Word.  Make time to listen for that still small voice that hovers on the edge, waiting to be heard over the press of the daily to do list.  Hold the mirror up, see that you are fearfully and wonderfully made, and know that He is God.

Grace and peace