January 23: A Lonely Bird on the Roof
The phone is quiet. The friends you drank with don’t call now that you’re not drinking. And the house feels very big.
“I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert. I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.”
The writer of this psalm compares himself to a pelican in the desert, an owl in the ruins, a lonely sparrow on a housetop. Birds out of place. Alone where no one else is. It’s one of the loneliest pictures in the Bible, and it’s honest.
Loneliness and drinking are tangled together. For some, alcohol started as a way to feel connected. The bar was where the friends were. Drinks loosened the tongue and made the evening easier. For others, drinking was what you did alone, after everyone else went to bed. Either way, it usually ends in the same place. More alone than when you started.
Honesty about Step One includes this. The unmanageable life isn’t only about hangovers and money. It’s also about the relationships that thinned out. The friends who drifted. The family members who stopped asking. The way drinking took up the space where people used to be.
When the drinking ends, that empty space can feel bigger before it fills back up. The drinking friends may fade. You haven’t made sober friends yet. Evenings stretch out.
This is one of the main reasons meetings matter. Not because they’re perfect, but because they’re full of people who know what this loneliness feels like and have found a way through it. Church can be another place. So can a men’s or women’s group, a Bible study, a volunteer shift. Somewhere with real faces.
The psalm doesn’t end on the rooftop. A few verses later, the writer turns to God, who hears the groans of the prisoner and looks down from heaven. The lonely bird is seen.
You are seen too. And there are people waiting to sit with you. You just have to walk through a door to find them.
One thing today
Go somewhere with people today. A meeting, a church, a coffee shop, a gym. Say hello to one person. That’s enough.
A prayer
Lord, I feel alone. Drinking promised company and left me empty. Thank You that You see me. Lead me to people who can walk this road with me.
The “we” of Step One is for lonely people.
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