Alone in the Middle of Forty Relatives

The condition has no name in either of my languages and it should have one.

It is not being alone. She is never alone. There are fourteen people in that house on an ordinary Sunday and forty at anything significant, and she has three cousins her own age and an aunt who calls twice a week.

It is not being unloved either. If she were ill tonight, the house would fill.

It is that in a room of forty people who love her, there is no one she could say a certain kind of sentence to. Not because they would be unkind. Because there is no shape in that room for a sentence like that; there is no moment in the day it would fit into, and the person she would have to say it to would be alarmed and would tell somebody else out of concern, and it would become a thing that was discussed rather than a thing that was said.

So she says nothing. For years. In a warm house.

And there is a sentence in the middle of a psalm about God's great deeds that has this exact person in it.

The psalm is about power and then it is not

Psalm 68 is a big, loud, military psalm. God arising, enemies scattering, mountains, chariots, a procession into the sanctuary.

And then, in the middle of it, the register drops completely.

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, King James Version)

A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows. Two categories of person who, in that society, had nobody to speak for them.

And what is startling is the placement. This is a psalm about a God who scatters armies, and the works it stops to itemize are domestic ones, listed in the same breath and at the same rank as the mountains and the chariots.

You are in a category God stopped a victory psalm to name. Psalm 68:5 puts the fatherless and the widow inside a list of great acts, and it is the Spirit of adoption, Romans 8:15, by whom a person addresses Him as Father rather than watching Him win something.

The word solitary is not the word for alone

Then the line this article is named for.

God setteth the solitary in families.

The Hebrew word behind solitary is about being an only one, a single unit, isolated in the sense of unaccompanied rather than in the sense of unpopulated. It is not primarily a word about how many people are in the room.

Which is exactly the condition at the top of this article. A person can be a single unit in a house of fourteen. The word does not require an empty building; it requires the absence of company, and company is a different thing from proximity.

And setteth in families is a placement verb. It describes something being done to somebody rather than a state improving on its own.

You are described by a word that does not depend on how many people are in the room. Psalm 68:6 uses the word for a single unit rather than for an empty house, and it is by the Spirit, Romans 8:16, that a person is borne witness to individually inside a crowd.

What the setting actually is

The obvious question is what it looks like when God does that, since most people reading this are not about to acquire a different family.

Part of the answer is that the family in view is not a replacement. Jesus is explicit about it.

I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you. (John 14:18)

Comfortless is, in the Greek, literally orphaned. He uses the word from Psalm 68:5 and says He is not going to leave anybody in that condition, and the way He says He will prevent it is not by arranging different relatives. I will come to you.

And the whole passage that sentence sits in is about the Comforter being sent, which means the setting in a family, in the New Testament version, is a Person taking up residence rather than a change of household.

You are not going to be left in that condition, and He named the remedy as Himself coming. John 14:18 says I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you, and it is the Comforter, the Holy Spirit named four verses earlier, who is the way that promise is kept.

And there is a second family, and it is real

The other half of the answer is that Scripture does describe a second household, and it is not a metaphor.

For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. (Romans 8:14-15)

The Spirit of adoption. Adoption is a legal placement, and it is exactly the verb Psalm 68 uses. Somebody is set into a household by an act rather than by a feeling.

And the evidence given for it is a cry. Not a certificate. A word said out loud, in the most intimate register available, which is why the address on this site is what it is.

I want to be careful here, because the second family does not cancel the first and is not offered as compensation for it. Nobody reading this should leave a table. But a person who is a single unit in a warm house is not being told to make do; they are being told that a placement has already been made, in a different direction, by an act of God.

You have been placed by an act rather than left to be included. Romans 8:15 calls it the Spirit of adoption and puts the cry as its evidence, and it is that same Spirit who bears witness with our spirit in the next verse.

The thing that helps is smaller than a solution

Practically, and I am going to be honest rather than tidy.

Nothing anybody says makes that room different. The shape is the shape. There is no sentence a person can deploy at a Sunday table that creates a moment for the kind of sentence they have been carrying.

What does move is having said it once, anywhere. Out loud, to God, alone, in the car or in a room with the door shut, in the words a person would actually use rather than the ones the room says together.

That is not a substitute for being known by a person. It is the thing that makes being known by a person survivable when it does not come, and it is available tonight, and it does not require anybody's cooperation.

And if the aloneness has become something heavier than that, if it has got to the point where you do not want to be here, that is a thing to say to a doctor, a counselor, a social worker, or a pastor you trust, and in the United States the 988 crisis line is answered by a real person at any hour. Say it to somebody who can carry it, tonight.

You are able to say it once, tonight, without anybody's cooperation. Romans 8:15 makes the cry the evidence of the placement, and it is by His Spirit, Romans 8:26, who helps our infirmities when a person does not know how to say a thing at all.