PROTECTION FROM LONELINESS
A Partner for Life
(Hosea 2:19–20)
For more than a half-century, Winston Churchill and his wife, Clementine, shared one of the most remarkable partnerships of any married couple in recorded history. In 1999, the Churchill’s daughter, Mary (Lady) Soames, published a collection of her parents’ correspondence, drawn from a treasure trove of more than 1,700 letters written between them.
One of Winston’s first notes to Clementine, dated April 1908, after only their third meeting, set the tone for the mutual admiration that was to follow. He wrote, “I seize this fleeting hour of leisure to write and tell you how much I liked our long talk on Sunday and what a comfort and pleasure it was to me to meet a girl with so much intellectual quality and such strong reserves of noble sentiment.”1
Winston Churchill had a blustery exterior, and Clementine once cautioned him about it. She wrote, “There is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues and subordinates because of your rough, sarcastic and overbearing manner. . . . I cannot bear that those who serve the Country and yourself should not love you as well as admire and respect you.”2 Perhaps it was this kind of insight that made Churchill such a loving admirer of his wife. We do know that Clementine relieved the loneliness of his powerful and public life. He wrote that he had no one but her “to break the loneliness of a bustling . . . existence.”3
Interestingly, God has always used marriage to picture His relationship with His covenant people. Just as two wholly committed marriage partners defuse the loneliness of a “bustling existence,” so God does the same for those to whom He is betrothed.
For believers in Christ, being spiritually united to God means having a lifelong partner who will defend them against life’s loneliness. Are you allowing Him to be the partner He wants to be for you? In your next lonely moment, seek the comfort of His presence through prayer and through the reading of His letters to you contained in the Bible.
God’s Promise:
He defends you against loneliness by always being with you.
