Back in 1917 during the Russian Revolution, a Russian Orthodox priest and eleven of his parishioners were placed in a prison by the Bolsheviks. They were left there to rot. From time to time, as the weeks went by, the guard of the prisoners would tell his superior: "There is someone else in that cell besides those twelve men. There is someone getting to them who helps them and provides them with what they need. I don’t know how this is possible. All I know there has to be someone with them." Finally, the superior of the prison impatiently went to the cell with the guard. They opened the cell door and herded the twelve prisoners out into the corridor. The superior counted them off one by one. He said to the guard: "Now, you see, there are only twelve." But the old priest spoke up: "But you have forgotten to count the thirteenth who has always been with us. You have forgotten to count Jesus Christ."

Again and again, in the fires of life, we have seen people standing unharmed and unafraid, because the Lord is with them. Emily Bronte, the author of Wuthering Heights, lived and wrote in a rectory on a bleak, gray moor in Yorkshire. She spent her days with a half demented father, two sisters who were dying of tuberculosis, and a brother who regularly came home howling drunk from the village tavern. Yet she could write:

No coward’s soul is mine,

No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere,

I see heaven’s glory shine,

Faith shines equal, arming me from fear.

Jesus walks our lonesome road. He knew heartaches and tears. He knew rejection and ostracism. He knew the loneliness that comes from standing alone for a great cause. He knew defeat and fatigue. He understood life as we face it. He knew the answers. He found that he had company on the lonesome road. He found the Father with him. He spoke those comforting words from which every lonely person can take heart: "I am not alone, because the Father is with me." I love that scene in Green Pastures when the children of Israel have gone on ahead into the Promised Land, and they have left Moses behind on Mount Pisgah on the other side of Jordan. What a pitifully lonely figure he is, as he watches them go, and what a terrible lonesomeness descends upon him. Then he hears a movement behind him, and he feels a hand on his shoulder. He asks: "Is you with me, Lord?" The voice that comes back warms his soul: "Cou’se I is, Moses, cou’se I is."