The Hospitality of God- Making a Companion

 18The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”...22Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.23The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.”

Thoughts: Clearly we were not meant to be isolated.  We are meant to be with someone else- not just in the sexual sense.  It is not good to be alone.  God cares about our being with other people and hospitality is born out of that.  If there are no other people, we cannot be hospitable.  Love means nothing if we are alone.  
    Wesley and others speak of those who have faith not being isolated.  I like to say that you can play football all by yourself.  You can toss the ball up in the air and catch it.  You can kick it up and catch it.  But football is best played with others.  So it is possible to be a Christian in a nursing home or on the Space Station (or other isolated places) by oneself.  But Christianity thrives with encouragement and human love.  
    Now, the ironic thing is having a person who differs from you- who is not just a clone, means that there are differences of opinion.  We are not to be loving and hospitable to only those who think exactly like us.  God did not mention the problems of being together- only that it is better together.  

Prayer: Thank you Lord, that you created the ability to have companions.  You cared for our hearts to love.  Help me to see that love is worth all the hurts or inconveniences that accompany any relationship. 

Loneliness is Not Good

 Day 4) Genesis 2:18- “It is not good for the man to be alone.”  This isn’t good.

     So God created the world, the lights, the seas, the earth, the plants and animals and man- after each one He says, “And God saw that it was good.”  Now God says for the first time “It is not good…for man to be alone.”  We are made to be with other people.  There have been hermits over the years, but it is not the same.    

     God made us to love other people.  Not just in marriage, but in friendship and fellowship.  Being in isolation is a temporary state we undergo out of love for others- that they might not get what we have.  So, yes, you are loving others when you are isolated to keep others safe.
    Isolation has often been used (historically) as a form of punishment in prisons.  Some now are considering this inhumane torture.  Most suicides in prison occur in isolation.  Mentally ill or stressed prisoners are especially effected. It is not good for us to be alone.  We can sympathize when we are in quarantine or isolation.  Many health-workers have self-isolated themselves from their family and friends away from their clinics/hospitals out of concern for them.  This adds to mental fatigue.

    John Donne was a British pastor/cleric who lived in the late 1500s- 1600s when the Great Bubonic Plague was still sweeping Europe, killing half the population.  He had a fear of being isolated, a fear of solitude at the height of the plague.  He said that this fear of loneliness was, “a disease of the mind at the height of the infectious disease of the body.”  He wrote these majestic words, “No man is an island, entire of himself; every man is a piece of a continent, a part of the main.”  Isolation hurts.  We know that.  I am simply “naming the demon.”  There were in the mid-early church hermits who went out to the desert to be alone with God.  Being around other people is also hard.  People can be more messy (or more neat) than we want.  People can rub us the wrong way with being too know-it-all or too simple.  People can be overly mean or doormats to others.  But the commandment to “love your neighbor” hinges on the idea “it is not good for the man to be alone.”  Love calls us to overcome pride, selfishness, and differences to get outside of ourselves for the other’s good- our own good- and the good of all- and the glory of God. 

Prayer: Lord, being alone hurts.

 

(John Delgado who works for a food bank isolated himself from his family
as mother, wife, and child were susceptible to Covid19 issues.  Miami Herald 4/3/20)