loneliness – Blog Of My Sojourn

You can block me later

To get any farther with my post here, you’ll have to go on reading it even when I tell you that I’m about to make a point by referring to the movie Lord of the Rings and not to the books. This has been sticking with me.

Gandalf urges Bilbo: “All your long years, we’ve been friends.” He needs Bilbo to give up a ring that has become too special to Bilbo. It’s not good for him. “Trust me, as you once did,” Gandalf tells him.

And so Bilbo making a great effort holds out his hand and turns it over and he drops the fate of the world on his hobbit hole floor.

Gandalf again, in Moria, with others some of whom knew Bilbo—some maybe not—remarks casually about Bilbo’s gift of mithril from Thorin. “I never told him, but its worth was greater than the value of the Shire.” Gandalf didn’t tell Bilbo that—Bilbo, his friend. He tells others, some of whom Gandalf perhaps hardly knew. He tells these others that he didn’t tell Bilbo. It doesn’t bother him to do so. He throws it out as an interesting factoid for the road.

Bilbo meanwhile, at Rivendell, is at peace. He is not aware of any of this. Perhaps occasionally a stifled pang of yearning comes over him and he wishes he could briefly hold that old ring of his once again.

But he will never know that he had the fate of the world in an envelope over there on the mantelpiece, or rather in his pocket.

He’ll never know the value of the gift Thorin gave him. It was strong, and pretty. Quite a nice gift. Worth more than his house and the houses of everyone he knew—but he didn’t know.

There are different kinds of friends.

There may be an amount of time which it was reasonable for me to spend thinking about this, and I may have spent more than that amount.

Maybe some of my problem is that I’ve been looking to be a Jonathan to someone’s David when in fact to someone’s Gandalf I was a Bilbo.

Originally written May 2025

Speaking of lessons to learn

I just came across this, by Kent Beck of Extreme Programming fame:

For the first 40 years of my life I believed safety consisted of holding up a mask so I controlled how other people saw me. Heaven forbid they should see me as *I* saw me.

At 42 that mask became unbearably heavy. I had to drop it on the floor. The mask shattered.

It took a decade to become comfortable that I couldn’t control how other people saw me. That lack of control didn’t matter because I was already safe.

The remainder of my life has been spent getting used to clothes that actually fit. Apologies for the metaphor salad but I’m trying to say something that was incredibly important to me.

It might be helpful for me to learn that one now. I don’t have time, energy, or strength to even attempt to control how others see me. My pitiful attempts are in shambles and were probably poisonous to begin with.

I don’t have a ton of free time to blog lately so I’ll throw in a couple of other, possibly related lessons that I’ve been pondering recently, which I may also need to learn:

It is freeing to believe, think, or know something that others don’t, and not always have to tell them.
Anyone on Earth could say anything at all about you at almost any time, without your knowledge, to whoever else they can, but you do not need to care.

Maybe it isn’t just that recognizing a problem helps one to solve it

Maybe recognizing an inescapable reality helps one to accept it, too.

Like coming to a theological position from which one doesn’t know how to return, and which leads to one disagreeing with nearly every other Christian individual and family that one knows personally. That’s somewhat isolating.

It’s also reality. One doesn’t set aside what one has come to believe is Scriptural, simply because one misses being in the same theological camp or because it’s sad and lonely turning away from the camp and trudging out in the dark night into the vast unfamiliar wilderness.

Perhaps this realization will help me in accepting my current reality.

Sigh.

Dear Jim,

I think that I quite understand you. I see you in a tumultuous time in life, having children to support and a wife to care for while you navigate what I think is a very significant transition. I am not even talking really about the theological changes; none of those are shocking, to me anyway. It’s that you’re (I use the term advisedly) a man, no longer a boy, now, and from boy to man is a transition. Perhaps you were unprepared?

You write that you feel adrift and without the “support group” that you’ve had all your life. Well my dear fellow, can you imagine a time when you’re yourself leading a support group for someone else? It is all well and good, in fact needful, for one to have minute direction in every decision of life—to not even have many decisions to make in life at the very beginning, though one naturally ought to have more of those as one matures—when one is a child. You are no longer a child, I think is what you’re coming up against. You have choices to make and now a family to lead, and you’ve spent so long awaiting the decision to be handed down to you that when it comes time for you, after prayer, to do the handing down yourself, you’re afraid.

Have you ever thought much about the disciples of Jesus when they set out across the sea with Him, and He was asleep? It struck me long ago when I read His response to them, after the great windstorm arose and the boat began to fill with water as the waves beat into it, and He had gotten up and rebuked the wind and told the sea to be still—He said to them, “Why are you so fearful? How is it that you have no faith?” Any mere mortal such as you or I or the Twelve or any other could have told you that naturally, when the waves begin to fill your boat and the storm rages and no land is in sight, you are going to sink and you’ll probably die. How would we not be fearful then? I pray that in such a case I will remember that the One who tells me “Let us cross over to the other side” is with me and that He is able to take me there. May it not be said of me that I have no faith (Mark 4:35-41).

And speaking of praying, do that, I recommend. Pray your heart out, and I will do the same. If only I can be assured that He is leading me then I do not have reason to fear. He is capable, not only of keeping and leading us, but of giving us peace along the way (Philippians 4:7).

What feels like a lifetime ago—but it was only about eight years ago—missionary work occupied a great deal of my heart and thoughts. I used to read about the Judsons, Adoniram and Ann, and the few who traveled with them on their pioneering voyage as some of the first missionaries sent out by the church in the United States. There weren’t many on that trip and not multitudes more awaiting them in the lands where they served, lands so far from home that a letter could take months to arrive, if it wasn’t lost at sea and never arrived at all. Judson lost his wife, you know. Twice he experienced that loss.

I thought as you face this being adrift and seemingly alone (but not alone) in the great sea of this life… having lost reassuring agreement with the ones you so long looked to and needed to be on the same page as, theologically… you and I could learn from the example of these brave followers of Jesus; and that we could gain some perspective on our own trembling. Here is a part of a letter that Ann Judson wrote to the ones at home as they were setting out. She was 23 years old.

My heart often sinks within me, when I think of living among a people whose tender mercies are cruel. But, when I reflect upon their miserable state, as destitute of the Gospel, and that it is easy for our heavenly Father to protect us in the midst of danger, I feel willing to go, and live and die among them; and it is our daily prayer that it may please God to enable us to continue in that savage country. Farewell to the privileges and conveniences of civilized life! Farewell to refined Christian society! We shall enjoy these comforts no more; but Burmah will be a good place to grow in grace, to live near to God, and be prepared to die. O, my dear parents and sisters, how little you know how to estimate your enjoyments, in your quiet homes, with all the comforts of life! How little you know how to prize dear Christian society, as you have never been deprived of it! How little you can realize the toils and perplexities of traversing the ocean; and how little you can know of the solid comfort of trusting in God, when dangers stand threatening to devour! But these privations, these dangers and toils, and these comforts, are ours, and we rejoice in them, and think it an inestimable privilege that our heavenly Father has given us, in allowing us to suffer for his cause.

I trust that their God and ours will preserve us, and will lead us safe to home.

Reminiscently,
Ben