Mother Theresa said that loneliness was the world's greatest disease, coming from a lady who spent her time caring for the underprivileged, sick and deprived in our world that is some statement. There greatest need was not money or the removal of poverty oe better medical care but relationship.
We were made for relationship, for friendship, for companionship to love and to be loved, we instinctively feel those needs. However, we also take them and twist them so that being loved can become the be all and end all. So the pressure is on all of us to find the group we fit in to be it the goths, the sporty jocks, or the emo set, or whatever. Find somewhere you belong, where people will accept you, where they will love you at all costs.
Or it is seen in the obsession with beauty as the staggering figures today on those who'd have cosmetic surgery to improve their looks or body image shows. The way to be loved is to be beautiful.
The Bible provides the antidote to just such misconceptions about relationship. We were made for relationship with one another, that's why in Genesis the only thing wrong in the garden is Adam's loneliness and so God makes Eve to be with him. But the other relationship in the garden we see go the other way - we see our relationship with God broken by actions that show God exactly what we think of him.
The story of the Bible is the story of God's plan to enable that relationship to be restored but not to impose it upon us. He sends his Son to tell us of the problem and then take our punishment so we are credited with his perfect record and justice is still done.
The result is a restored relationship with God, that brings with it restored relationships with those around us. It changes our view of beauty, it repairs our shortsighted view of love and relationship.
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