I Wanna Dance with Somebody

Written by Geo Bowman 

Cue the lights, get the tacky decorations up, and don’t forget about the playlist for our “fiesta de cochera.” It is almost impossible to say you grew up in Costa Rica without having experienced a garage party, mostly to celebrate children’s birthdays. These gatherings are an explosion of food, fun, and dancing--lots of dancing that, most of the time, requires that two people dance together. I personally love dancing, but when you don’t have a partner, not only does it lose part of the fun, it feels lonely. This reminds me of the so-called “month of love.” For some people, February can feel like dancing by yourself. It can feel lonely, but more than that, it evidences a deeper soul issue, our ultimate desire to be loved and to belong.

This desire overflows from the way God created us, and because of this, loneliness is an emotion we all experience, have experienced, or will experience. Whether we are single, married, widows, widowers, or dating, we will all, at times, feel as though loneliness has taken a hold of our hearts and minds. 

Back in December, our church gathered to commemorate Jesus’s birth. We treasured the idea that Jesus is Immanuel, ”God With Us” (Matthew 1:23). The promised Messiah became flesh and lived amongst us and experienced what it meant to be fully human. In His humanity, not only does He understand us, but He cares for us. At this point, you might be thinking, “He surely never experienced loneliness, He was always surrounded by people, disciples, and the very presence of God.” But, I want to remind you of the moment where Jesus was crucified. Darkness had covered all the land and, in agony, Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). Fast forward to verse 50, it says He cried out one more time and yielded His Spirit. 

The sacrifice of Jesus is sufficient and all-encompassing. Not only did He bear our sins and sicknesses, but He also bore our loneliness. Our eternal loneliness and separation from our Father in heaven was put on Jesus’s shoulders in that dark hour. He was forsaken, so you and I never have to be. 

In fact, when Jesus was still with His disciples, He told them He was going back to the Father. The disciples' hearts were filled with sadness, but they didn’t know that Jesus was not going to leave them; instead, He was about to grow even closer to them. In John 16:7, Jesus tells His disciples, “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.” Jesus is God with us, but like Jesus said, it was to our advantage to receive the Holy Spirit because through Him, God is now in us.

Although loneliness is very real and can take us to some of our darkest places, our emotions were never meant to rule over our lives. They are a beautiful part of God’s intelligent design.  As we follow Christ, we learn that, when we experience emotions like loneliness, we can come to Him and surrender our hearts to His care and embrace. 

For eternity, the Father and the Son have been dancing to the rhythm of Their glory and splendor, and it is through Jesus’s sacrifice and the inheritance of the Holy Spirit that we get to be a part of this dance. Rest assured that, for now and for eternity, you will never have to dance alone, never, ever again.  
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