God sets the lonely in families. He brings out the prisoners with singing, but the rebellious dwell in a sun-scorched land.
Psalms 68:6 (WEB)
in its setting: Psalm 68:4-10
1 Where we are
Yong Han is forty-six and fourteen months out. At a quarter past ten on Wednesday he is on the blue chairs at the Social Service Office, queue ticket 148, a plastic folder. The rental application wants a second name, and he has been through his contacts twice. His phone buzzes with the six hundred dollars everyone has been talking about, and it cannot fill in the blank. What he wants is one person willing to write a name under his and not take it back. What he fears is that the blank is accurate — that he belongs to no household now, and the form has only written it down.
2 What the passage is doing
Psalm 68 is a marching song. David has the ark going up to Zion, and the verses around this one are loud with weather and armies. Then, in the middle of the noise, the song stops to say what this God is like: a father to children who have none, a defender of widows in court, the one who puts solitary people into a household and marches prisoners out into open ground. It was sung by people once given land they had not earned.
יְחִידִים
yechidim · solitary ones, only-ones
This is the plural of yachid, the word used of Isaac when he is called Abraham's only son. So it carries preciousness as well as aloneness — the one of a kind and the one left over are the same word. English "solitary" sounds like a mood you could shake off. The Hebrew makes it a position: a person standing without kin. And the verb beside it says God moves that person into a household.
3 Taking it with you
You may not be able to sign that form for him. But notice what the psalm says God does without being asked: he does not wait for anyone to qualify by having the right relatives. He settles the solitary. Jesus went to the cross with his friends scattered and nobody's name beside his, and he was put outside so that people with no one could be brought in and given the family name. That is how you got in — not by your household, but by his. So when you sit beside a man with a blank on his form, you are late to something God began before you.
A prayer you can pray
God, I am tired of blank spaces. You know the names I have run out of asking. Thank you that you settle people who have no one, and that you brought me in without asking who my family was. Do that again for the man waiting beside me today. If the form is still empty tonight, stay with him anyway. Amen.
Soli Deo Gloria — to God alone be the glory.
