God Sets The Solitary In Families

The chair on the other side of the table has had laundry on it since March.

Not the same laundry. It rotates. But the chair itself has not held a human being since the day he signed the lease, and somewhere in the spring it quietly stopped being a chair and became a shelf, and he could not tell you which day it happened.

He can tell you almost everything else. Which of the four burners actually lights. Which stair on the second flight complains. What time the light comes across the counter in the morning and exactly how long it stays before the building next door takes it away. He knows the name of the dog in 3B and not the name of the man on the other end of the leash. Eleven months. He has learned a whole city the way a man learns a language from street signs.

And in eleven months he has not said one sentence out loud, to another living person, about the God he talks to every night in that room.

You know how that happened, because it happened to you, and it was never a decision. There was no evening when you resolved to keep quiet. There was a first week that was about boxes, and a second week that was about the job, and then there was a Tuesday in the fourth month when you realized you had not said the word out loud since you got here, and by then saying it would have been a strange thing to introduce.

Back home they are good to you. Every one of them. When it came up at the table two winters ago they were kind about it and slightly puzzled, the way people are kind about a hobby they cannot quite picture you doing. Nothing is broken there. Nobody is against you. It is simply not a language spoken in that house, and you have never once held that against them.

So you built a life here out of a job, a route and a grocery store, and somewhere underneath it you concluded something you have never said out loud either. That placement is your own job. And that eleven months in, you are not doing it well.

Read the verb before you read the sentence

There is a line in the Psalms that people quote for its warmth and never read for its grammar, and the grammar is the whole gift.

God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land.Psalm 68:6

Look at who is doing what. God sets. The solitary are set. That is a transitive verb with God on the front of it and a person on the end of it, and there is no third party in the sentence doing any arranging.

It does not say God helps the solitary find families. It does not say God encourages the solitary to look harder, or blesses their efforts, or opens doors for them to walk through if they are brave enough to try the handle. It says He sets them. The solitary are the object of that verb, never the subject, and a man who has spent eleven months trying to be the subject of it has been carrying a weight that was never issued to him.

You are set among God's people, and you were not the one who did the setting. None of that is my reading of your situation. Psalm 68:6 hands the verb to God and never once to you, and His Spirit is the one who worked it in your case, eleven months ago, in a moving van, with no ceremony attached to it at all.

That is not a lesser belonging because you did not feel it happen. Almost nothing God does arrives with a sensation attached. You did not feel the sun move this morning either, and the light still came across the counter at the usual hour.

You have relatives in this faith that you did not grow up with, and the kinship is not a figure of speech. Psalm 68:6 calls it a family and not a comparison, and the Holy Spirit is the one who registered you into it while you were busy learning which burner lights.

Kin is not the same thing as company

Now, here is the distinction that has been missing, and once you have it you will not lose it again.

Company is who is in the room. Kin is who you are related to. Those are two different facts about a man and they can run in opposite directions for years at a time without either one being false.

A man can be surrounded and unrelated. That is a common enough thing in an office. And a man can be entirely alone in a rented kitchen at nine in the evening and be related to an enormous number of people, because relation is a matter of what happened, not a matter of who is standing there.

So when you take stock at the end of a day, you have been counting company and calling it family, and the count comes back low every time, and you have concluded from a company shortage that you are short of kin.

You are not short of kin. You are short of company. Those are different problems, and only one of them is a problem about who you are.

You were placed into a family older than the country you moved to, and older than the language they speak here. That is written down and it has never been withdrawn, and the Spirit of God is no rumor about it: He is the one who put you exactly where the writing says you are.

Think for a moment about who is in that household. The ones who wrote the letters you read. The ones who sang out loud in prisons at midnight for reasons nobody could talk them out of. The woman in some village four hundred years ago who prayed in a language you will never hear a recording of, about a child, at a stove, with the same God listening. Scripture speaks of a great crowd of witnesses around the ones still running, and they are not spectators to a stranger. That is family watching family.

This is yours tonight, before anybody in your building knows your first name. Scripture is the deed on it, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding the deed, which is why the count in your kitchen has never had a vote on the matter.