Have you ever been terribly alone,-- even when other people were all around you? Perhaps you were walking down a street, totally absorbed in some personal crisis, and, despite people coming and going beside you it seemed there was no one to whom you could go for encouragement and counsel. The business of decision-making is often a lonely matter. Sometimes you lie awake at night, when everyone else has gone to sleep. And you go over in your mind the worries and decisions of the day past and of the one to come. Late one evening in the last week of his life, Jesus and the disciples were walking together. They were climbing a hill in the darkness. Eventually they came to an olive orchard.

More precisely to a place where olives are crushed for their oil. When they came to the edge of the orcha…