God Sets the Solitary in Families

She did the arithmetic on a Tuesday because the calendar in the kitchen has the anniversaries on it and there were three in one week, which does happen.

Her husband, nineteen years. Her sister, four. And the friend she had since they were both eleven, who died in February, and whose name is on the calendar in her own handwriting from when she wrote the year out in January and did not know.

She is seventy seven.

She stood at the calendar and worked out, without meaning to, that there is nobody left alive who knew her before she was thirty.

That is a particular kind of arithmetic and it has a sound to it, and the sound is the reason she has not told her nephew, who is good and who would come, and who would be very kind about it in a way she does not currently have the energy for.

And what she concluded, standing there, is not that she is lonely, and it is not that she is sad, although she is both sometimes.

What she concluded is that she does not have a household any more.

She used to cook for eleven. She has a table that seats eight and a pie dish that does about six and a set of plates she has not had all out at once since two thousand and eighteen. She still cooks properly for herself, every day, because she is not going to stop being a person who does that.

But the word household has quietly left her vocabulary, and when a thing at church talks about families or about your own home, she has started to hear it as being for other people, and she does not resent it, she just steps out of the sentence.

There is one line in a psalm that puts the solitary and the families in the same clause.

God setteth the solitary in families

I have to be careful here, and considerably more careful than usual, because this is where somebody normally hands over a consolation. Your church is your family. There is your nephew. Get out more. I am not going to do that. A woman who has outlived everybody who knew her at thirty does not need her situation rearranged in her hearing by somebody who has not lived it.

Psalm 68 is a psalm about God on the move, and in the middle of a lot of large language about mountains and armies there is one very small domestic sentence.

A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation. God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains (Psalm 68:5-6).

Read who does the setting. God setteth. It is His verb. The solitary are not told to go and find a family, and no arrangement is asked for from them at any point in that sentence.

And read the company that line keeps. It is in a list with the fatherless and the widows and the prisoners, which is to say: with people whose situations were done to them and are not their doing.

You are placed by somebody rather than left to arrange it. That is not me stretching the psalm; Psalm 68:6 makes God the subject and the solitary the object, and the Holy Spirit who inspired that line put no instruction in it for the person being set.

And notice the word families. Plural, and undefined. The psalm does not specify what one is made of. It says God does the placing and it leaves the shape of the thing entirely open.

A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation. God setteth the solitary in families.Psalm 68:5-6

Stepping out of the sentence

Now the thing she has been doing without noticing, because it is the actual injury.

When somebody at church says families, or your household, or your own home, she steps out of the sentence. Quietly, immediately, without resentment, the way you step off a path to let somebody past.

She has been doing that for about four years, and the effect of it is not loneliness. The effect is that a very large number of things that were said to her have not been received by her, because she took herself out of the audience before the sentence finished.

You have never been outside the address of anything God has said. Psalm 68:6 puts the solitary inside the same verse as the families rather than beside it; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) has not been speaking past a woman of seventy seven for four years.

This is yours right now, standing at a calendar with three dates on it: a placing that was done by God and does not wait on a headcount. Psalm 68:6 makes the setting His action; the Spirit who inspired it did not attach a minimum number to the word family.

What a household actually was

Let me be precise about the word, because it is doing damage and it is being used wrongly.

A household in Scripture is not a nuclear family. Cornelius had kinsmen and near friends in his. The jailer at Philippi had a house that included people who worked there. Lydia's household is mentioned without any husband anywhere in the account. The word covers whoever is under a roof and whoever is near enough to be at the table.

So the honest question is not whether she has a household. It is who is currently near enough to be at hers, and the answer, if she sat down and did it, would include a nephew, a woman two streets away she has taken soup to twice, the person on the desk at the clinic who knows her by name, and two people from that church she would call if something happened at night.

That is a household by every definition Scripture uses. It is not the one she had. It is not eleven at a table. It is the one that exists.

You were never asked to reconstitute what you had. Psalm 68:6 says families and does not describe one; the Holy Spirit who inspired that line left the composition open on purpose.

Fruit is not output, and a pie dish that does six is where the difference lands. Output is the table for eleven: countable, past, and not coming back. Fruit is what grows on a woman who still cooks properly at seventy seven for a house of one, and John 15:4 says the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, for eleven or for one.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. While the oven cools, tell Him one true thing about the calendar with nothing asked for and nothing wanted. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody counts that.