Daily Manna · Day 53 · February 22
Father to the Fatherless
“A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation.”
You may be one of the people for whom Father's Day is quietly unbearable. The card aisle assumes a man who showed up.
God, this psalm calls you a father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, and says you are that in your holy habitation, which means it is not a mood you are in but a position you hold. We would like to hear that as sympathy. It is not sympathy. Judge of the widows is a job with a second edge on it: to take her case is to rule against whoever wronged her, and this same psalm opens with your enemies scattering like smoke. You do not pity the fatherless. You adopt them, and then you go and find out who left.
We confess we have wanted the comfort without the courtroom. We have wanted you to be tender about the absence and quiet about the man. Be both. Be tender with what he did to us and do not be quiet about it.
And you said something else in the next line that we would rather not have read. God setteth the solitary in families. Which means you intend to do this partly through people, and people is us.
There is a single mother in your street, or a boy whose father stopped coming. You already know the name; it arrived while you were reading. Nobody is instructing you to solve anything. There is simply room on this case, and it is open. The ride to practice, the fixed door, the Saturday, the envelope with nothing written on it. God has taken the case Himself, and there has never once been a wrong person standing beside Him on it.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 53 is Where the Light Lives (Daniel 2:22).