I wonder if Adam felt some indefinable ache that one night before he drifted off to sleep. I wonder if he dreamed of what God would do that night, taking a part of him to make another someone. And though it wouldn’t take long for the man and woman to learn fear and shame and the kind of haunting loneliness that to some degree lurks within each of us even now, I wonder if…I wonder if, only for a little while, the three of them felt eternally, blissfully connected.

This desire for connection drives us all, really. It drives us either away from or toward our Heavenly Father. We seek fulfillment in people, places, substances, behaviors… we drink and drug, work and worry, worshiping wealth, seeking sanctuary from the nagging discomfort… and always it is more and more and more, but still we cannot fill the emptiness. And yet, some of us are able to turn and run to the Well, and finally slake our thirst. At least until we wander away again, as little children often do. Having tasted the living water, though, we’re never the same again. We know.

It’s risky, of course. Love will cost us our very lives. Even when I was hopeless and drunk, the idea of giving myself over to this most powerful of things—Love—felt in some ways more frightening than the living hell in which I lived. And so I stood just out of reach, my hands hovering near the face of God, so afraid to risk touching such unfathomable beauty, peace, hope. I recall a man grown old before his time, lost and slowly dying in his dark addictions. And I remember how dangerous it felt, this surrendering to Love…

And then. Then, just as I had almost decided to run away, to give up on the hope of love and resign myself to the vague loneliness I had felt all my life…just as fear nearly separated me from the endless possibilities of joining hearts with one very special person…

Christ came, finally, to forever put an end to our loneliness. Through Him and in Him, we have access to an intimacy that defies our emptiness, and casts off our chains.