It has been three months and the meals and the messages have stopped. Everyone else is back to normal and I am still in it. How do I handle this stretch?

“I looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there was no man that would know me: refuge failed me; no man cared for my soul.”

This psalm carries a note saying David prayed it in a cave, hiding, at the lowest point of his life. He says he looked around for someone who cared what happened to him and found no one. He is not being dramatic for effect. He is describing the specific loneliness of a season that everybody else has already left, and the prayer is preserved for people still in one.

“At my first answer no man stood with me, but all men forsook me: I pray God that it may not be laid to their charge. Notwithstanding the Lord stood with me, and strengthened me; that by me the preaching might be fully known, and that all the Gentiles might hear: and I was delivered out of the mouth of the lion.”

Paul writes from prison near the end of his life that at his first hearing nobody stood with him, and then asks that it not be held against them. Immediately after, he says the Lord stood with him. He does not pretend the abandonment did not happen or that it did not sting. He holds both facts at once: people drifted off, and he was not finally alone.