I have a confession to make. It is a confession that I'm not comfortable making so, odds are, it is one that God wants me to make. I struggle with depression and loneliness. This struggle occupies a disproportionate amount of my thought and brings so much worry and stress with it that it's often almost overwhelming.

What do I do about it? Try and stay busy or waste a large amount of time reading, surfing the internet or daydreaming about my future mate.

I see others in happy, unhappy or even dissolving relationships and I want what they have. Yes, I'd even settle for the dissolving relationship because something has to have been there to dissolve - sometime in the life of those two people was a point where they cared about each other.

I don't covet others wives: I covet the fact that the love the bridge-groom shows to his bride is reflected back to them by the very one they shine their love on. The cyclical nature of this is an astonishing display of power.

Anyone who has ever heard audio feedback or stood between two mirrors understands this power and its immensity.

For audio feedback a signal is introduced into the system, it gets reproduced by the speaker system and re-enters the system via the same microphone it was originally produced on and is doubled and the loop continues - growing in power with each iteration. It grows in power exponentially until it is the strongest signal in the system and overwhelms everything else.

Likewise with standing between two mirrors. One mirror results in one reflection of yourself. Add another and there are suddenly an infinite number of you. An infinite amount of love. Love like someone standing between two mirrors. Reflected and strengthened by each reflection.

So what do I do if its God's will that I remain a bachelor all my life? I don't do a thing. God is the source of the infinity of reflections. I'm just one of those reflections. God is God, I am as nothing in comparison to His glory and infinite wisdom. If it is His will I only hope He reveals why someday. If He chooses to keep me in the dark? I can do nothing to change that. Maybe it's my 'Thorn in my flesh'.

The biggest fear in all of this is this: That it isn't God's will that I am lonely and alone - that it's my fault. I fear that the hooks of my sin have allowed the enemy to whisper in my ear: "you're not good enough", "who in their right mind would want a fat slob like you?" "The only way you'll ever have anyone is through your imagination", "Its just a picture - how can that hurt you?"

Yes, it is just a picture. It is the scattered image reflected back from a mirror that's been shattered: never the entire image, but bits and pieces of that image trying desperately to gain the power found in the whole, but failing miserably.

Though it will never be the entire image the jagged edges can still cut, still cause injury. I'm bleeding a death caused by a thousand of these cuts. Even though I no longer look at those images they fill my dreams, call to me through the memory of my sin.

They display to me their piece of the whole and promise the rest. It cuts me while I try to reassemble the shattered mirror. Meanwhile all I hear is "you're not good enough - you'll never be good enough. Why don't you just sit down and forget? Who needs the entirety of the image?"

Though I listen desperately - that's all I hear - Satan's voice whispering his lies. I want the feedback that is His still, small voice to overwhelm that signal, to drown out the whispers. The feedback of His love on me, filling me, driving the darkness away. My heart fears that my cries are lost in that darkness that surrounds me. My mirror is shattered and only He can make it whole.

My head knows that He hears my cries. I know that He loves me and cares for me. Now if only my head could convince my heart.