It is not good for man to be alone.

What happens when your dog dies? When you made the right choice and get a speeding ticket anyway? When you think you have pink eye and can't drive yourself to Urgent Care?

This isn't profound, convincing or theologically based. But it's important to me and I've thought about it a lot tonight. I can understand why God would ask someone to be celibate; or giving us impulses we didn't want or choose and then asking us to control them; or even sacrificing loving someone else and being loved by them. But as for mere companionship? The Bible clearly states: "It is not good for man to be alone."

I'm desperately afraid to walk down the path the Church lays before me--not because I think it will be hard (though it will be) or because I fear it will be a worthless endeavor (its already been the most richly rewarding experience of my life) but for the fact that it will be painfully lonely.

We all need someone to be there for us, someone consistent, who knows us well enough to know how to help. "That's what God is for. That's who He is," would be the typical Mormon answer. But each of us knows that sometimes that's just not true.

C.S. Lewis wrote profoundly about how God is often not there when we need Him most. "... But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A dour slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become."

And when that happens we need someone tangible, someone real, someone to hold us and care for us and tell us that it will be okay. Someone that for me, apparently, is not supposed to be.