Few songs have touched my own sense of loneliness like Simon & Garfunkels "I´m a rock".

I still remember being a teenager with a lot of people I knew and almost no friends, feeling strange and outside everything, and listening to Paul Simon as he managed to put words to my feelings.

Judging from how popular this song was I wasn´t the only one who connected to these lyrics!

"A winters day, in a deep and dark december, I am alone,

Gazing from my window to the streets below
On a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow.
I am a rock, I am an island.

I´ve built walls, a fortress deep and mighty,
That none may penetrate.
I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain.
Its laughter and its loving I disdain.
I am a rock, I am an island.

Dont talk of love, I´ve heard the word before;
It´s sleeping in my memory.
I won´t disturb the slumber of feelings that have died.
If I never loved I never would have cried.
I am a rock, I am an island.

I have my books and my poetry to protect me;
I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock, I am an island.
And a rock feels no pain;
And an island never cries"

This kind of response to disappointment and loneliness, to hide, to close the door and let no one in, to put up so many defences that in the end nobody can reach you anymore, this is a strategy of survival that will kill you in the end.

It doesn´t protect you from bitterness or from any other destructive feelings, it doesn´t protect you from the evil words or acts of other people, but it does very effectively close out all friendship, all love, all good things that might come your way!

This kind of shield and armour produces the opposite of what the lonely and hurt imagines it would!

Ever since Adam and Eve tried to hide themselves among the bushes in the Garden of Eden this has been Man´s instinct. To hide, to protect themselves.

And it kills, because we weren´t made for loneliness!

And when I myself remember how I felt back then, forty years ago, I realize once again how fantastic it is that I got saved, that I got the opportunity to go home to my Father, come to the one place from which I´ll never get thrown out.

I´ll never be alone again...