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, because every card in the aisle assumes a father who showed up.
God, this psalm calls You "A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows," and it says You are this "in his holy habitation." So this is where You live and who You always are. We would like to hear it only as sympathy, yet a judge of widows takes up her case, and that means ruling against whoever wronged her. This same psalm opens by asking that Your enemies be scattered: "As smoke is driven away, so drive them away." You pity the fatherless, You take them in as Your own, and You also call to account the one who left them.
We confess that we have wanted the comfort without the courtroom. We have wanted You to be tender about the empty place and quiet about the man who left it. Be both tender and just. Be tender with us, and do not stay quiet about what was done to us.
In the next line You said something we would rather not have read: "God setteth the solitary in families." So You mean to do this partly through people, and those people are us.
As you read this, a name may already have come to mind: a single mother on your street, or a boy whose father stopped coming. Nobody is asking you to fix everything. There is simply room for you on this case: a ride to practice, a door repaired, a Saturday given, an envelope with no name on it. God has already taken the case Himself, and anyone who stands beside Him on it is standing in exactly the right place.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 53 is Where the Light Lives (Daniel 2:22).