The leaf is in the table, which means nine, which means the chair from the study has been carried through and nobody can get past the corner without everybody breathing in.
It is a good lunch. That is worth saying first, because it is true. The beef is right. Somebody has brought a lemon thing in a dish with a chip out of it that has been at every family lunch since 1998. There is a nephew at the far end showing a video to a cousin who has already seen it twice and is being generous about it.
She passes the gravy. She passes it again. She passes the green beans to her left and takes the potatoes from her right and puts two on her plate, and then a third, because a woman with two potatoes gets asked if she is all right.
Her mother-in-law asks about the garden. She answers about the garden.
Somebody asks whether they got the quote back for the roof. She answers about the roof.
Somebody asks what the plan is for the summer.
And the table does that thing a table does, where the general noise drops by about a third because a question has been put and an answer is expected, and there is a serving spoon in her hand and she is holding it slightly too long.
She says they have not really thought about it yet.
The news is four days old and it is not hers. It belongs to the person sitting three chairs down on the other side, who asked her on Thursday night, in the kitchen, with the light off, not to say anything to anybody until he had spoken to his brother himself. He was right to ask. She would have asked the same. She is not going to say a word.
So she sits in the middle of every person she loves, and passes the dishes, and answers eleven questions, and asks none.
Later she counts them, in the car. Eleven questions answered. None asked.
That is the shape of it. Not a room with nobody in it. A room with everybody in it.
That is you.
Maybe yours is a staff room. Maybe it is a school gate at three fifteen, or a birthday party, or a Sunday morning with somebody's hand on your shoulder saying it is so good to see you. And you have gone home and stood in your own hallway with your coat still on, feeling something that has no good name, because loneliness sounds like an empty house and this was the opposite of an empty house.
I am not going to explain to you why you are carrying this. I do not know why any of it happened, and I am not going to invent a reason on the drive over. And I am not about to tell you to go and find somebody to talk to, because you may have somebody and you may not, and this has to work either way or it is not worth reading.
Solitary is a word He uses without correcting it
There is one line I want to put in front of you, and then I want to slow down over three small things in it.
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
The first thing. Solitary.
God uses the word. He does not soften it, He does not put a note beside it explaining that the person ought not to feel that way, and He does not open with a comment about how they got there. He names the condition, in one plain word, and then He acts.
You are named in that line exactly as you actually are, and there is no correction attached to the word. Psalm 68:6 says solitary with no rebuke anywhere near it, which is not an accident of translation but the shape of the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a line like that land on a person as recognition rather than as a diagnosis.
The second thing. Who is doing the setting.
God setteth. The solitary person in that verse arranges nothing, organizes nothing, and is not congratulated for reaching out. They are the object of the sentence throughout. All the verbs belong to God.
You have not been handed a task in that verse, and the whole weight of the doing sits on the other side of it. What is written puts God in the active voice and the solitary person in the passive one, deliberately, and it is the Holy Spirit who applies that division of labor to somebody who has spent all week being the one who carries things.
A full table is not a defense against it
The third thing is in the neighborhood of the verse rather than in it, and it is the part that made me want to write this for you.
Look at who God is in the two lines above. A father of the fatherless. A judge of the widows. In His holy habitation.
Those are not two random examples. In that culture they are the two standard categories of person with nobody: the child with no father to speak for him, the woman with no husband to stand in court beside her. Of every title available, the psalm chooses the two that describe God going to the person who has been left without anybody in the room.
And then it says: in his holy habitation. That is where He is when He is doing it. Not in a special mode. That is His ordinary address.
You are dealt with by a God whose habitual position is beside the person with nobody, and that was His position at your table on Sunday. Psalm 68:5 to 6 chooses the fatherless and the widow out of every possible example, and it is His Spirit who is called the one who comes alongside, which is a description of location before it is a description of feeling.
Which brings me to the thing that is actually eating you.
Nowhere does that verse measure a person's aloneness by the number of chairs. A full table is no defense against being solitary. A crowded house is not a rebuttal. The nine people who love you were not failing you on Sunday; they simply did not know, and you had good reasons for that, and no fault attaches to anybody in that room including you.
You were not alone at that table, and the company you had did not depend on one person there being told. The written line places God with the solitary while they are still solitary, before anything changes and without waiting for an announcement, and the Holy Spirit does not need to be introduced to a room before He is in it.
Now let me be careful, because that picture could be misread as an instruction, and it is not one.
It is not a suggestion that you go and locate a person. Some readers have three people and cannot reach any of them today. Some readers have nobody at all, and if that is you, you are not reading a lesser version of this. The one in the kitchen is God, and He was in the kitchen before anybody stacked the plates.
You are accompanied here whether or not one single person in that house understands it, and that has been true since Thursday night with the light off. Psalm 68:6 makes God the companion of the solitary rather than the arranger of their social life, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes company something a person can actually feel in a room where nobody has been told.
One plain thing, and then I will carry on. If these last days have taken your thoughts somewhere darker than lonely, as far as not wanting to be here, tell one human being today: your doctor, a crisis line where you live, or one person who can sit with you. Those people are good and ordinary. Telling them is not a betrayal of anybody's news, and it belongs inside all of this rather than outside it.
You have been kept company by Someone who never once needed you to explain the situation first. That is written into the psalm's own order, where God is with the solitary before any circumstance moves, and His Spirit is the one who stays in the room when the conversation cannot go anywhere near the truth.
And there is a second load in a day like Sunday that nobody talks about. There is the lunch, and then there is the hallway afterward, where the whole thing gets carried again with nobody watching.
You have not been left to carry Sunday twice, once at that table and once more in your own hallway with your coat still on. What is written hands God every verb in the sentence and leaves the solitary person none of them, which means the carrying was never assigned to you by yourself, and His Spirit is the one who takes the second load off somebody who has already done the first.
Declare this over yourself
Say them in the car, in the hallway, with your coat still on. The right to speak them is yours because you are in Christ and Christ is in you: it was given to you, not earned by having people around you, and it is not withdrawn from a woman with nobody to call. And they go up under His will and never over it, so He may answer in His own way, and the outcome is His. What is written is what makes them weigh anything, and the Holy Spirit is what makes them live, not how many chairs are at the table.
- Sunday table, you are not proof that I am on my own. Scripture says God sets the solitary in families and that He is the one doing the setting, and He was at that table before the leaf went in.
- Suspicion that nobody knows me now, get out of this house. In the name of Jesus I put you out on the word that names God a father to the fatherless and a judge of the widows, and His Spirit was beside my chair while I was passing the gravy.
- Lord, You were in that room the whole afternoon, and You did not need telling what I was carrying. I thank You that Your word gives You a holy habitation and puts You beside the person with nobody, and that Your Spirit has never once waited to be introduced. I am naming one name out loud, and if there is no name to say, I am saying it to You.
Psalm 68:6
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