I’ve been alone for the last couple of days in Baton Rouge. Oh there have been lots of folks around, but they weren’t my wife or daughter or grand kids. They were not my family. I had a great dinner last night with Tyler, Jesssie’s boyfriend. He’s almost family and that was great, but then I moved on to the Sleep Center where I spent the night. Alone again. I didn’t like it. I have to spend the rest of today in a seminar in Baton Rouge, alone. It’s not good but it’s not the kind of loneliness I have felt. I guess the most alone I’ve ever been was in Vietnam. I wasn’t in country or anything that heroic but I was far from Rose and the kids. It was bad. All the worse because I was also far from God.
Now since I walk so much closer to Him I am never really alone. I would rather have family around, but I always have Him. He’s all I really need. During the upcoming Kairos weekend I have been assigned a talk called “You are not alone.” Its purpose is to convey the idea that the Christian is never alone. Not only does he always have Christ with Him, but he has the physical expression of his body, the church. Here I speak not if an institution or building but the loving body of believers that are the Church. The reason that Vietnam 40 years ago and Baton Rouge today are so lonely is that although I have the spiritual presence of Christ, I don’t have any of his physical body around. I need both.
Wednesday mornings have become so important to me because for an hour or so I am in His physical presence through my brothers. How can I convey to men who are in the most lonely situation imaginable, serving life sentences in a maximum security prison, that I, in some small way, understand their loneliness and can offer a solution. Especially when that solution can be found in other inmates who, until now, they have held in great distrust.
Pray for me that I will be able to convey a solution that is at once so near and yet so far. How can I tell them they are never alone when they are His and in the presence of others that share new life in Him? Can you know such a truth by anything but experience? Can they be made to feel enough of His love through us to take that great a chance. Pray that they will.
Be blessed.
Nick.
Nick Sigur
337-205-23
1-866-340-4418 fax
337-319-9417 mobile
PO Box 81384
Lafayette, LA 70598
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