Thoughts on Loneliness & Solitude
By ACCTS staff member Doris Waldrop

Quietness and solitude are essential in developing our inner resources. There is no limit to developing those resources if we tap into God! Isaiah 30:15─ "In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength." Are you tapping into God's resources?

A. One has to learn to be quiet, reflective and meditative. As a physician once said: "The failure to cultivate the power of peaceful concentration is the greatest single cause of mental breakdowns."
B. Solitude helps to restore ourselves physically, emotionally and spiritually and is essential for good mental health. However, solitude for isolation is not.
C. Social isolation really has negative effects on health.
D. Goethe─ "Talent develops itself in solitude; character in the stream of life."
E. In solitude we become aware that our worth is not the same as our usefulness.
F. We can choose to have times of solitude in our life, but loneliness is something we feel emotionally, but can change.

Loneliness is something we all experience, but for different reasons. The cause of loneliness usually revolves around our extreme concern for ourselves. Psalm 142:7─ "Bring me out of my prison, that I may give thanks to your name!"

A. Jesus chose to be alone with God, and He went to lonely places to pray and to commune with His heavenly Father.
B. Loneliness is the first thing which God named as not good. (Genesis 2)
C. Emotional wounding often results in loneliness as well as repressing emotions and feelings. It is important to be in touch with our feelings─the way we sense that we are alive.
D.We can be lonely with people and lonely when isolated. Loneliness is very real during times of family separations. "That gaping inner emptiness can actually help us if we listen to its message."
E. Billy Graham─ "Loneliness is the greatest problem facing humanity today." Mother Teresa of Calcutta saw it as a heart-hunger and claimed that it is easier to relieve material poverty than this poverty of the soul.
1. Heart hunger can be filled with God's love and the love of family
and friends.
F. Elizabeth Elliot─ "The pain of loneliness is one way in which God gets our attention."
G. Henry David Thoreau─ "I never found a companion that was as companionable as solitude."
H. Blaise Pascal─ "All man's miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone." Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live the Christian life.

We can be lonely even with human companionship, but we are never lonely with God! As someone said─ "Loneliness is a game of pretense; for the essential loneliness is an escape from an inescapable God."

Whom do you depend on to fill that void of loneliness and aloneness?

Christmas Greetings from Zambia

A military Christian in Zambia writes, "Calvary greetings in the precious name of our Lord Jesus Christ...I just wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas and Prosperous 2007, as you enter and celebrate the festive season, remember and reflect on the good things that the King of kings and Lord of lords has done for you in this year ending soon."

Christmas Greetings from Australia

The Military Christian Fellowship of Australia sends these Christmas greetings to military Christians around the world:

"On behalf of the council and staff of the Military Christian Fellowship, we would wish you all a very merry Christmas. We wish an exceptionally merry Christmas to those who are deployed and their families. May God richly bless you and your families over this Christmas season. May we not be lost in the 'gift giving exercise', without us remembering the true reason of this season and the greatest gift of all...God has given the ultimate gift of gifts in His Son. He offers us a timeless relationship with him throughout eternity. So this Christmas share the real reason: that of the immortal God come as mortal Man for the salvation of ALL."

Pictures of the Year

Time magazine shows their pictures of the year, including many war-zone related photos: http://www.time.com/time/yip/2006/ .

Military Ethics

If you're interested in military ethics, the International Symposium for Military Ethics takes place in January. Here's some info:
http://www.usafa.af.mil/jscope/

Remembering Fallen Soldiers

This site gives personal information about fallen U.S. soldiers. You can search by name, branch, state, etc. and you can post comments: http://www.legacy.com/soldiers.asp.

If anyone knows of similar sites for other nations' soldiers, let me know at accts at accts dot org (Our email written out to avoid spam!).

"Grave and Deteriorating"

The U.S. Iraqi Study Group says that the situation in Iraq is "grave and deteriorating":

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/12/06/iraq.study.group/index.html

Report excerpts: http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/12/06/D8LRCO480.html

Top 10 Books of 2006

Christianity Today's Top 10 Books of the Year list includes some that might be of particular interest to military Christians:

Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger, by Bruce Kuklick (Princeton Univ. Press) "...the best I've read this year on U.S. foreign policy...focuses on efforts in the postwar era to bring foreign policy into the domain of scientific analysis."

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright (Knopf) includes "...was the best account I had seen of al-Qaeda's ideological foundations and formative history."

Link:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/features/bccorner/061204.html