Nobody Came For Me So I Come To Everything

You go to all of it.

The assembly at nine in the morning that lasts twenty minutes. The thing in the hall. The meeting that could have been an email and the other meeting that genuinely could have been. The concert where your child is in the back row of a group of forty and you cannot actually see her.

And you do not go because you enjoy them. Some of them you actively dread.

You go because there was a hall once, years ago, with rows of chairs in it, and you sat in the front looking for a face that was not there, and you have never once been able to describe that feeling to anybody without making it sound smaller than it was.

So you attend. Everything. And you are extremely tired, and you cannot work out why the tiredness has an edge of resentment on it, which then makes you feel worse.

God setteth the solitary in families

There is a short line in Psalm 68 that says more about your situation than its length suggests.

God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains. (Psalm 68:6, King James Version)

Setteth the solitary in families. That is an action God performs, deliberately, on somebody who was alone.

Which means the answer to a solitary childhood, in scripture's account of it, is not compensation. It is placement. Being put somewhere.

And that is a completely different mechanism from the one you have been running. You have been trying to cancel out an old absence by generating an enormous quantity of presence, and that is arithmetic rather than healing.

You have been trying to balance a ledger that God has never once proposed to settle by addition. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that distinction land in a woman who is exhausted, and Psalm 68:6 puts the solitary into a family rather than crediting their account.

And look at the second half, which is not decoration. Bringeth out those which are bound with chains. The two halves belong together: placement, and release from something that holds.

A chain is not a lack. A chain is a thing that constrains movement. And an obligation nobody ever gave you is a very good description of one.

You are able to be brought out of something rather than only being given something, and there has never once been a rule that says relief has to come as more. The Spirit of God is the one who identifies which of the two you actually need this term, and the written word pairs the setting in families with the breaking of chains.

The debt nobody issued

Here is the part that usually loosens it, and it is worth being exact.

Nobody gave you this debt. Your own parents did not ask you to pay it. Your child certainly did not, and in most cases would be amazed to hear it exists.

You issued it to yourself, in a hall, at about nine years old, and you have been paying it ever since at a rate nobody ever set.

You are carrying an obligation that has never once been presented by any actual person. The Holy Spirit is the one who tells the difference for somebody who has never had it named, and Psalm 68:6 speaks of chains as things a person is bound with rather than debts they owe.

And there is a cost on the other side of it too, which is harder to say.

A parent who attends everything out of obligation is not fully at any of it. Part of you is in a hall in nineteen ninety something, checking whether the chair is still empty. And your daughter is on a stage in front of you now, and getting a mother who is partly somewhere else.

That is not a rebuke. It is the actual mechanics of paying an old debt with present time.

You have been spending today's attention on a room that closed decades ago, and no amount of attendance has ever once reached backward. The Spirit of God is the one who brings a person out of a hall they have been sitting in for thirty years, and the written word offers release from the chain rather than a longer payment schedule.

You were never required to be at all of it, and there has never once been a requirement written anywhere except in a nine year old's chest. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes belonging feel different from owing, and Psalm 68:6 sets the solitary in a family, which is a place rather than a duty.

Name the one you are missing

So here is the thing to do, and it is one sentence said out loud.

Tell your child, tonight, which one thing gets attended this month and which one does not.

Say it plainly. I am coming to the concert. I am not coming to the assembly on the fourteenth.

Do not apologize for the missed one. Do not explain it, and do not offer a substitute. The whole exercise is in the not explaining.

You are able to leave a sentence standing on its own with no repayment stapled to it, and an explanation has never once been what made a mother present. The Spirit of God is the one who steadies a woman through a silence she expected to be filled, and Psalm 68:6 places the solitary rather than billing them.

And watch what she does with it, because for most children the answer is nothing at all. She will say all right. She has no idea that a debt exists, and she is not the creditor.

Psalm 68:6 breaks the chain as well as setting the solitary in a family, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a woman says out loud which thing she is not attending.

You are permitted to miss one and stay exactly who you are, and a woman who misses an assembly has never once become the chair you were looking at. The Spirit of God is the one who holds a person through the strange feeling of not going, and the written word brings out those which are bound rather than requiring them to keep paying.

You have already told the truth by naming it out loud, and it has never once been the attending that made you present. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes placement do what attendance was never able to do, and Psalm 68:6 sets a person into a family as an act of placement.