Solitude

Meetings. Problems. Phone calls. Questions. Chicken Littles dashing in to report falling skies. People running up with their hair on fire (some needing only an eye-dropper to extinguish, others needing the Mississippi river). Demands for reaction, not reflection.

At times I wonder, "Is this why Jesus so often went away, alone?"

Perhaps it is one reason, but I must avoid thinking that it is the reason, must avoid the trap of seeking escape as an end.

I believe that Jesus used solitude as a means: a means to prayer, a means to have time with the Father, a means to recharge in order to re-engage. When I look at the big picture of His life as a whole, or at the big picture of the Bible as a whole, I am drawn away from the smallness of my everyday perspective. I realize the foolishness of equating:

• my self-focused yearning for peace and quiet with His God-focused preparation for the next step toward the cross,
• my petulance and impatience toward others with His righteous outrage toward hypocrisy and profanity,
• my limited view of surfaces and symptoms with His eternal view of purposes and causes.

The solitude of a cave in which I can lick my wounds is no substitute for the peak on which He met the father, whether the mountain peak of prayer or the hilltop of Calvary.