Everybody I Chose Has Gone

He is seventy four and the arithmetic is not complicated.

Douglas died in February. Ray moved to be near his daughter in the spring, and they speak, and it is not the same and both of them know it. Bill, who was the funny one, went four years ago now, which he still cannot quite fit into his head. Two more moved away when they retired, to places with better weather, and one of them sends a card at Christmas with a robin on it.

The men he chose. Fifty years of choosing, from work and from the club and from the two years he did something with a boat, and every single one of them is either gone or four hundred miles away.

The street, meanwhile, is full.

There is a family opposite with a trampoline. There is a young man two doors along who does something with computers and has never once been anything but pleasant. There is a woman on the corner who runs a coffee morning in the hall on a Thursday and has asked him twice.

He has said no twice.

He would not put it this way out loud, but the thinking underneath is fairly plain. Those are not his people. He has nothing to talk to them about. A coffee morning is for a different sort of person, and the young man does something with computers, and what on earth would they say.

So he sits in a house that is very quiet after four in the afternoon, and he has decided, without ever announcing it, that the social part of his life is over and that this is simply what happens.

On Thursday the woman on the corner asked a third time. He said he might.

He puts the solitary in families, and He picks them

Sit down a minute, because there is a line in a psalm about this and it says something about God that is going to be uncomfortable and then extremely good.

God setteth the solitary in families: He bringeth out those which are bound with chains.Psalm 68:6

He sets the solitary in families.

Notice who does the setting. Not the solitary man. Not his preferences, not his history, not the fifty years of good judgement about company that got him Douglas and Bill and Ray.

God does the setting, and a family you are set in is by definition a family you did not assemble.

Hear this in that quiet house. You are not at the end of your company, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture says He sets the solitary in families as a thing He actively does, and the Holy Spirit has been arranging that street around you while you have been counting the funerals.

Now let me say the honest thing about the men you have lost, because I am not going to talk you out of that and it would be an insult to try.

Douglas cannot be replaced by a coffee morning. Bill was funny in a way nobody on that street is going to be funny, and the particular ease of fifty years is not available from anybody you meet at seventy four, and every word of that is true.

But look at what you have done with that truth. You have taken a real grief and turned it into a policy, the written word never authorized the policy, and the Holy Spirit has been quietly working against it for two years. The policy has a sentence in it: those are not my people.

That sentence is the only thing standing between you and a full house on a Thursday.

Hear this too. You are not being asked to replace anybody, and Scripture is what says so. What is written does not offer the solitary man a substitute for what he lost; it says God sets him in a family, and the Spirit of God has never once expected a new person to do the job of a dead friend.

And now the part that will cost you something, because there is one.

The men you chose, you chose because they were like you. That is what choosing is, and it served you well for fifty years, and at seventy four it has run out, because the pool you were selecting from has been emptied by time and there is no more of it anywhere. The written word saw that coming, which is why it gives the setting to God and the Holy Spirit rather than to your judgement.

What is left is what was always underneath: the people who are here. The trampoline. The young man with the computers. The woman on the corner who has now asked you three times, which is a great deal more persistence than most people manage, and which you should probably notice as the kindness it is.

Not your sort. Correct. That was true of everybody in every family that ever existed and it never stopped one of them being a family.