I glanced up from my reading tone cold snowy morning last week and caught a strange sight outside the window.

Against the morning brightness of freshly fallen snow, the somewhat hidden sun cast moving cloud shadows on the ground. The leaves on the trees were still. No wind was visible. Yet the clouds were moving as evidenced by their shadow silhouettes silently streaming across the snow-covered ground. For the brief minutes of this nature process, I watched, mesmerized by the display before my eyes.

"Clouds are the dust of [God's] feet" said the prophet Nahum (Nahum 1:3) in the Old Testament. And as I reflect this Lent season on the shadows that followed Jesus to the Cross, the clouds' moving shadows that morning spoke to my heart. It was as if the Holy Spirit was whispering to my soul, "The shadows are cast by My light to reveal the darkness of the human heart. But as they pass, I pass with them to reveal that those walking in the shadows do not walk alone."

As it turned out for me, that week's Lent reflection was on the Shadow of Loneliness.
"Then all the disciples deserted him and fled." (Matthew 26:56).

I had lunch recently with someone whose spouse had abandoned her. Just up and left. No word as to where. Just left her and their thirty-five year marriage. And just like that she was all alone. Abandoned suddenly by the one she had loved and trusted, her mind reeled into a ball of convoluted confusion. Her body took to spasms of uncontrollable sporadic shivering. Insomnia became her companion. The empty house echoed endlessly her pained despair. The silence of loneliness sliced into her soul.

I wonder how Jesus coped with his shadow of loneliness when all whom he loved and trusted left him. Just scattered and ran out on him. Deserted, abandoned, he was left to pick up the pieces of whatever was left of his life on this earth alone.

The cloud moving shadows sight that morning told me that though deep loneliness plagued his path, though the shadows of life were dark and ominous for Jesus in those last forty days, he was not alone. His Heavenly Father was passing with him.

As I sat and listened to my friend's journey two years on in a lonely divorce process that has been at a standstill, I felt helpless. And as we parted, she left seemingly succumbed to her circumstances, the shadow of loneliness evidenced in her gait. I left feeling even more helpless.

How thankful I was for the sight of the moving shadows on the snow. As I prayed for my friend I was visibly reminded by our Emmanuel that she does not walk alone. Her newly found Heavenly Father is walking alongside her in her shadow of loneliness.

Shalom