Eleven people needed something from you today and you were glad about most of it.
Your daughter about the childcare. Two people at work who always come to you rather than to the person whose job it is. Your neighbor with the form. Your mother twice. Somebody from church about the rota, which took forty minutes, and which you did not mind.
You are not isolated. That is what makes this so difficult to describe. Nobody looking at your week would find a gap in it.
And there is something you have not been able to name for about two years.
It is not loneliness, or the word does not fit. Loneliness is what a person feels when nobody is there, and everybody is there, constantly, all day.
The nearest you have got is this: nobody in that eleven rang you about nothing.
Every conversation you had today had a purpose in it, and you were the person the purpose was directed at, and you were good at it, and at the end of the day you sat down and something in you was completely empty in a way that had nothing to do with being tired.
You tried to look it up once. You typed lonely but not alone and got a great many pages about being single, and none of them were it, and you have not tried since.
What this page will not do
I am not going to tell you to set boundaries. That is the advice this always gets, and it is not wrong exactly, and it does not touch this at all: you could halve the eleven tomorrow and the thing would still be there at the end of the day.
I am not going to tell you to make friends. You have friends. Several of them are among the eleven, which is part of what makes this so hard to explain. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Psalm 68:6, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.
I am not going to prescribe rest. You are not short of rest in the sense of hours; you are short of something else and I am not going to pretend the two are the same because rest is easier to prescribe. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Psalm 68:6, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.
And I am not going to give it a name, because I do not have one, and inventing one would be the kind of tidiness this whole site exists to refuse.
If it has gone further than this, if you are not sleeping or nothing lands any more, that is worth taking to a doctor, and that is a genuine and separate thing.
You are not being difficult by not fitting the available words. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and it does not stipulate that the heart be able to describe itself, and the Holy Spirit is in that kitchen at the end of a day with eleven people in it.
The verse has a strange sentence in it
There is a line in Psalm 68 that most people read past because the surrounding verses are louder.
God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains.Psalm 68:6
Setteth the solitary in families.
It is an odd promise and it is worth not smoothing it out. It does not say He gives the solitary people to look after. It does not say He gives them a role, or a household, or a purpose.
It says He sets them in something. Placed inside, belonging, on the inside of a thing rather than at the head of it.
That is a different arrangement from the one you have. I have no authority to say that by myself. Scripture carries it in Psalm 68:6, and the Holy Spirit carries it to you.
You are at the center of a great many lives. That is not the same as being inside one. Being at the center means everything comes to you and you are the fixed point, and a fixed point cannot lean on anything, because everything in the system is oriented toward it. That is Scripture's sentence and not mine, Psalm 68:6, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this page who makes it true where you are.
The verse describes something you have not had for a long time, and there is no instruction attached to it. It is simply what He is described as doing, and the doing is His.
You are not outside what that verse promises. Scripture says God setteth the solitary in families, Psalm 68:6, and the setting is His action rather than a project assigned to the solitary person, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that placing rather than advising anybody to arrange it.
Why nothing describes it
The vocabulary is missing and that is not your fault.
Our words for this are built around absence. Lonely, isolated, alone: every one of them assumes an empty room, because that is the common case and language forms around common cases.
Yours is a full room. The room has been full for years and the thing is still there, and there is no word in ordinary English for being surrounded and unknown, so you have had nothing to type and nothing to say to anybody. Scripture stands under that in Psalm 68:6, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.
And there is a second reason nobody has noticed. You are extremely good at this. The eleven come to you because you are competent and warm and you sort things out, and competence is invisible; nobody checks on the person who is managing. It is written, in Psalm 68:6, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.
That is not a complaint about them. Not one of the eleven would be anything but appalled if they knew, and several would come round immediately.
They do not know because there has never been a way to say it.
You are not unseen by God for being competent. Scripture says the Lord looketh on the heart, 1 Samuel 16:7, and the outward appearance in your life is a very well managed week, and the Holy Spirit is not reading your capability as evidence that you are fine.
What can be done tonight
Nothing that fixes it, and I am not going to pretend there is.
One thing, and it is small.
Say the true sentence out loud to God, before anybody needs anything, in the kitchen, in the words you would use if you were not being careful. Scripture settles that in Psalm 68:6, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.
Nobody rang me about nothing today.
That is it. It is not a request, there is nothing in it to be answered, and it is the first time in two years that the thing will have existed outside your own head.
And one more, which is harder and is not a solution either. Tell one of the eleven. Not all of them; one, the one who would not immediately try to fix it. Say the plain thing: I am surrounded by people and there is something about it I cannot say properly.
You will not be able to explain it, and that is all right, because you are not asking them to understand it. You are asking them to know that it is there.
You are not required to be understood in order to be accompanied. Scripture says bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ, Galatians 6:2, and bearing does not require the burden to be explicable, and the Holy Spirit is at work in somebody who is told a thing they cannot make sense of.
There is not one, in the sense of a change to your week that would resolve this, and I am not going to invent it in the last section after being honest for the whole page.
What there is, tonight, is that it can be spoken.
Say it out loud to God in the kitchen. Badly, before anybody needs anything, without turning it into a request.
Then tell one person this week. Not to be fixed and not to be given advice about boundaries. Just so that somebody on this earth knows it is there.
And be careful with what you do next, because the reflex of somebody in your position is to solve it by taking on something else, and that will not work and you know it will not.
You are not unknown to Him even if you are unknown in a full room. Scripture says God setteth the solitary in families, Psalm 68:6, and the Holy Spirit has been in this kitchen at the end of every one of these days, with a woman that eleven people rang and none of them saw.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in the early kitchen. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so the standing to speak was given to you and two unnamed years have not withdrawn it. Scripture carries every line here and the Holy Spirit brings them the distance. Nothing here explains this and nothing here promises it changes; He answers in His own way and the outcome is His, and however He answers, none of it is a verdict on you.
- Word lonely that does not fit and keeps me from saying anything, you are not the only word there is. The Word of God says God setteth the solitary in families, and in the name of Jesus I bring a thing that our language has no name for.
- Assumption that somebody would have noticed, get out of this house. Scripture says the Lord looketh on the heart, 1 Samuel 16:7, and the Holy Spirit has never once read a well managed week as evidence that I am fine.
- Lord, the setting in that verse is Your action and it was never a project handed to the solitary person, and You have been in this kitchen at the end of every one of these days. I have said the true sentence out loud, and I am telling one of them this week.
Psalm 68:6
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