Addendum

Maybe it's because I was writing about loneliness earlier today; maybe it's because the overwhelming rain today has thrown off my routines and the sky is a dingy gray. Maybe it's messages I've gotten from my daughters and others I love who are far, far away these days. There are probably lots of reasons, but I find myself in a lonely spot tonight, functioning as a sort of flannelgraph figure to illustrate my own point from earlier. It's ironic. Thankfully this is not one of those gut-wrenching evenings that were all too common last winter and occasionally still raise their draconian heads. This is more of a wistful kind of thing that is tempered a bit by the knowledge that I'm surrounded by an excellent community, I have good friends and meaningful work and lots more, including my plan very shortly to drive up to the north end of the campus and see how many deer are out in the meadow. But when this song by Lifehouse came on tonight as I was sitting in the second-floor writing studio prepping my sermon for Sunday, thinking about practice-preaching it and looking westward over the lake, it exactly captured my mood.