There were thirty two of them, in a wooden rack screwed to the wall of the corridor by the back stairs. Four rows of eight. Each one had a little brass frame on the front with a strip of card in it and a name typed in capitals.
Ifeoma's was third row, second in.
Things went in there. Not important things, mostly. A photocopied list. A birthday card that somebody had got everybody to sign in the wrong order. A folded note from a woman she barely knew asking her to pray about a hospital appointment. Once, a casserole dish returned and washed up, with a rubber band round a thank-you note.
She used to check it on her way past without thinking about it, the way you check a letterbox.
That corridor is not somewhere she has been for eighteen months.
And her life is fine. This is the part that makes the whole thing so hard to say out loud without sounding ungrateful. She has a flat with her own name on the lease. She has a job she is good at. She has a car with a full tank in it and a mother she rings on Sunday afternoons and a colleague she has lunch with on Wednesdays.
Nothing is wrong. She is not in trouble. She is not lonely in the way people mean when they say lonely.
She just is not anywhere.
She worked out what it was last Tuesday, in the café at the garden center, which is a ridiculous place to work anything out. A woman two tables over had a coat draped across the chair opposite her, saving it, and she kept glancing at the door, and eventually a friend came in and the coat came off the chair and the two of them started talking before the friend had even sat down.
Ifeoma looked at that for a while. And then she thought, very plainly, with no feeling attached to it at all: there is no room anywhere on this earth today where somebody has put a coat on a chair for me.
Not one. Not a rack, not a rota, not a slot, not a chair, not a strip of card in a brass frame with her name typed in capitals.
She is not drifting the way you drift when you are in trouble. She has a flat and a lease and a car. It is more that she has come loose from the fittings.
And she has noticed something that she likes even less. She has started thinking of herself as optional.
The verb in this verse belongs to somebody else
Look at the sentence God says over exactly this, and notice who is doing the work in it.
Father of the fatherless and judge for the widows is God in His holy dwelling. God settles the lonely in a home.Psalm 68:5 to 6
Psalm 68:6 hands that sentence one verb, and it is not yours. God settles the lonely in a home. Settles. Not helps to look. Not opens a few doors and waits to see. Not points in a direction and leaves the walking to the person. You are being settled by hands that are not your own, and the Spirit of God is the one doing that settling while you are still trying to work out where a person would even start.
Read what comes immediately before it, too, because the psalm puts them side by side on purpose. Father of the fatherless and judge for the widows. God introduces Himself here specifically as the God of people who do not currently have the household everyone assumes they have. He is not describing what He does for the well connected. He is naming the ones with nothing in the rack.
Nobody is asking you to organize this
Here is what I am not going to do, and I want to say it plainly before we go any further, because half the advice a woman in your position gets is exactly this and it lands like a bill.
I am not going to tell you to join something. I am not going to suggest a plan, a next step, a direction, or a reasonable timescale by which a person in your position ought to have found somewhere. Nothing in Psalm 68 asks the lonely to locate the home, apply for it, choose between two of them, or be ready. The settling in that verse is done to a person, not by them.
Somewhere along the line you picked up the idea that belonging is a thing a competent adult arranges for herself, and that a woman with nothing in a rack has failed at an admin task. Read 1 Corinthians 12:18 instead. God arranged the limbs in the body, each one of them, just as He chose. You were placed, by choice, by name, by somebody with a design in mind, and it is the Spirit who did the arranging, not the person who happened to be running a corridor.
And that is not encouragement from me and it is not a mood I am trying to put you in. It is what the Holy Spirit has been pressing into you through Ephesians 2:19 for a year and a half while you filed it as a nice line about the early church. You are no longer strangers and foreigners but fellow citizens with the saints, and members of the household of God. Members. Present tense. In a flat, on a Tuesday, with nothing in the diary.
Loose from the fittings is not adrift
There is a real difference between the two and it is worth being exact about it, because you've been using the second word for the first thing.
Adrift means nobody has hold of you. Loose from the fittings means the shelf came off the wall.
I have no standing to tell a woman that she belongs somewhere. I have never been in that corridor and I do not know what your Tuesdays are like. Psalm 68:5 has the standing, and it says that the God who lives in a holy dwelling is Himself the father of the fatherless, which means you have somebody's household as your legal address right now, and the Spirit of God is the one who registered it rather than any committee anywhere.
So let me say the honest thing about the rack, since we are being exact. I do not know whether a strip of card with your name on it is coming, or from where, or when. Nobody honest could tell you that, and the ones who put a season on it are guessing out loud in your kitchen.
What is settled is the other question, and it is the bigger one. Being planted is a standing, not a strategy. You are not required to have a plan by Sunday in order to be somewhere, because Psalm 68 makes the placing a thing done to a person rather than a thing achieved by one, and the Spirit has been holding you in it whether or not any of this looks like placement from where you are sitting.
Here is the turn, and it asks nothing of you at all, which is the point of it.
You are already placed. Not once you have found a group, not once somebody puts a coat on a chair for you, not once there is something in the rack again. Scripture says God settles the lonely in a home, and the Spirit of God is not holding that placement open pending an application from you.
And nothing here is telling you what to do about any of it. If you never walk into another corridor with a rack of pigeonholes in it, the sentence in Psalm 68 does not change by one word. If you do, it does not change either. The standing was never resting on the furniture.
You have a Father who introduces Himself in Psalm 68:5 by naming the people with nobody, and the Spirit of God has been reading that verse over you since long before there was ever a strip of card with your name typed on it in capitals.
Stop reading yourself as optional. There is no room in heaven where you're the one they could have managed without.
Declare this over yourself
Say these standing on the floor of your own flat, out loud if you can. The authority to call yourself placed when nothing around you says so is not confidence to be worked up on a better Tuesday: it is yours in Christ, given to you, standing on what Scripture has already settled and carried by the Holy Spirit rather than by your own reserves. Say them, keep your feet flat, and leave every room, every rack and every timing of it with Him, however He answers.
- Empty slot in a rack in a corridor, you are not where my name lives. Psalm 68 has God settling the lonely in a home, and He has already done the settling on me.
- Idea that I have quietly become optional, get off me. God arranged every limb in the body exactly as He chose, and in the name of Jesus you do not get to call that drifting. I am placed, and I am standing still in it.
- Father, You settle the lonely in a home, and You did the settling Yourself, with no committee and no plan of mine. My feet are flat on this floor and I am standing where You put me.
Psalm 68:6
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