By Jodi Rae Ingstad 

I may be a lot of things but the one thing I am not is lonely.  
Everyone including you crabby people are like angels among me.  I view you from a different understanding than most.
All week I’ve been inundated with images of loneliness.  I was at a retreat and viewed a video involving an elderly man. He was thinking back on his full life. They showed images of him and his wife. The first pictures were of their marriage and then it graduated into other periods of their life.  We saw this man with his young children through all stages of their lives. The man appeared to be aging rapidly by the time the photos of him and his grandchildren appeared on the screen. His wife died. The children and grandchildren all had lives and agendas of their own. The man, once surrounded with the love of too many people in his expanding family to keep track of, lay alone and lonely in a nursing home bed. I cried in front of people that day and couldn’t get the images out of my head.
Just today I cried again. I watched a documentary on homeless people. The producers of this piece did a magnificent job. They captured the deep essence of a day in the life of a person with no home. Beyond that they encapsulated in my heart the emotion of pain in the eyes of these people.  If their eyes are the windows to their souls then the producers of this documentary must have used window cleaner before they began filming. Clearly I could see. I cried because I wanted to just reach out and tell them all they mattered.
This would be a great place to come clean about something so you don’t read on gagging as if I’m sickening you.  Had I ever been pretty enough to enter a beauty contest I would have been the girl who not only said but totally believed I could accomplish the following:  “I want to help find world peace, save all the lonely people and help all the sick people.   I want to teach forgiveness for those who know not what they do and I want to feed all the hungry children in the whole wide world.”
The emotions that came with me when I was created are both a blessing and a curse.  The emotions bless me when I can use them to help someone or some situation. They are a curse when they lock themselves in my heart, creating a fortress of pain and suffering in me. I cannot set them free until I find or force an outcome.
Figuring an outcome to combating loneliness is an easy one not only for me but for you too. Every child conceived needs only a few basic things to survive and thrive. It is innate in most of us to nurture their needs.  So why is it not innate in us to nurture the needs of adults in our society as well?  
I challenge you with this riddle:  Could you be lonely despite the fact you’ve successfully gotten all that you think you need? Could what you think you need and what your really need be locking you inside a heart sad and lonely?
And I close in challenging you with this theory. If you’re lonely despite all that you have- could you give a piece of your locked up heart to a person who doesn’t have all that you have to free the both of you?  It’s easier than you think.  All you have to do is recognize every human you can. Smile, touch, wave, and speak. You may just be surprised!  “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”  Everything is clear.  All you have to do is see it and care enough to recognize another. Loneliness flees when recognition arrives.