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CAN YOU HEAR THE CRIES OF LONELINESS?

A Story from Max Lucado: In the summer of 1980 a story about an attractive girl who was young and successful stirred the US. The story broke the evening news with the headline; Judith Bucknell was dead -- it was number one hundred and six that year in the steamy city of Miami in the month of June. She was 38 years old and weighed 109 pounds. She was stabbed 7 times and also strangled. What struck the nation that steamy day was not just her murder but her diary. She had kept a diary of her life and the reporters started reporting what she had written in it. It unveiled a painful epitaph to a very lonely life. One writer made these comments about Judy a character in her diary which was her- the character is struggling to find love, weary of all the broken promises of love, she has a voice which is yearning for love. The character Judy at age 38 had many lovers over the last fifty six months 59 to be exact. No she was not a prostitute but actually lived in a lavish place called Coconut Grove. She was a successful secretary but a loser at real love-amazing love. She wrote: Where are the men with flowers and music..I feel so old, so alone, unloved, unwanted, abandoned and used up...I want to cry and sleep forever...I'm alone...I want to share something with somebody" (Page 44, 45 No Wonder They Call Him the Savior).

Her diary was filled with loneliness and despair, a success at work, respectable, designer clothes, apartment overlooking the bay, a jogger, successful in the eyes of the world but really alone in her life -- very alone -- Can you hear the cry of loneliness and pain?

She was like Gomer and our city of Chicago is filled with people like Judith Bucknell and Gomer's.

Cries of loneliness -- listen again to the cries within your city! They come from the rich and famous, the poor and unknown, the married and the single, the high schools and the colleges, the blue collar workers and the white collar workers.

Can you hear the cries?

God did -- he heard their cries -- he experienced their loneliness and brokenness.

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