The Phone Call You Need to Make Today

Someone you know is having a rough day. You may not know it, because your someone wouldn’t want you to worry.

As your someone waits for a diagnosis, pushes through chronic pain, wrestles with gender or sexual identity, grieves a death, or struggles through another sleepless night with a new baby, you have no idea how alone your someone feels.

Loneliness is something of a pandemic these days. How ironic it is that most Americans feel a deep sense of loneliness and mistakenly believe we’re all alone in our loneliness. We are a community of lonely people, including the someone you know who is having a rough day who might be praying a version of this prayer from “Sheltering Mercy: Prayers Inspired by the Psalms,” Psalm 70:

Grant me strength, O Lord.
Can You not scatter these dark spirits
with the sound of a thundering army,
or twist their devil tongues to confusion?

On this day, you might be the one to scatter the dark spirits, to re-member (bring back together) someone with your community. You might be the one to embody the promise and join in the prayer of the next paragraph of Psalm 70:

For You,
Lord of light and beauty,
are Lord over death and darkness as well - 
all evil prostrates in Your presence.
Send those taunting voices back to the depths of the earth
where they belong.

There is a phone call you need to make today to scatter the dark spirits and reshape the community of the lonely into the community of the re-membered.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash