One Chair, One Plate

She is good at cooking for one now, and it took about four years to get good at it.

That is a real skill and nobody talks about it. Buying for one without waste. Knowing which things halve and which do not. Freezing in portions that are actually one portion rather than the two portions a person tells themselves is one. She has a small pot she is fond of and a plate she uses and a place at the end of the table with the light from the window.

Ruby is seventy-four. Her husband has been gone eleven years and her brother four and her son, who was the last, two years ago in March, and there is nobody left. Cousins, at a distance, at Christmas, kindly.

She goes to that church. She has for fifty years. She is on the flower rota and she is one of those people who is regarded, correctly, as a pillar, and if you asked anybody there whether Ruby was lonely they would say no, she has the whole church.

And there is a word in the Bible that she reads past every time she meets it, and she has never once been able to put herself inside it. The word is household.

She can put herself inside forgiven. She can put herself inside kept, and she knows a good deal about that. But household means people at a table, and she has one chair.

If you have got good at cooking for one, here is the question. Which verse says that is the arrangement?

The psalm names her exactly

God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains.Psalm 68:6

The solitary. That is the word, and it is not a general word for people going through a hard patch. It means the alone one, the single, the one who has nobody, and it is chosen precisely.

God setteth. A placing word. He is described as doing something deliberate with that person.

In families. Which is exactly the word Ruby cannot put herself inside, and the psalm puts her there specifically, by name, as the very category the sentence is about.

And notice who else is in the verse. Prisoners. This is a list of God's characteristic actions toward particular kinds of people, the way you might say a doctor sets bones and stitches wounds, and the solitary being placed in families is on that list as a thing He does.

You are the person that verse is specifically about, and it is already what He is described as doing, and the psalm named your exact category on purpose. I am not being kind about a woman's table. It is written in Psalm 68:6, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a word chosen for the alone and lays it in a kitchen with one plate in the rack.

What He has actually done about it

And now let me say something practical, because a woman of seventy-four does not need a sentiment, she needs to know where the family is.

The New Testament is blunt about where God has put believers. Paul calls the church the household of God. He tells Timothy to treat the older women as mothers and the younger as sisters, which is not a metaphor about being nice; it is an instruction about the actual relations of an actual family.

And Ruby has been in that building for fifty years thinking of herself as a pillar of it rather than a member of it, which are two different positions, and only one of them gets fed.

She has been serving a family she has not joined.

You are a member of a household and not only a pillar of a building, and the placing is already done. Scripture calls it the household of God (Ephesians 2:19), and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been setting a solitary woman among people for fifty years while she was doing the flowers.

What it would cost her to receive it

And here is the honest difficulty, and it should be named, because everybody in that church would like to solve this and nobody has, and the reason is not that they have not tried.

They have tried. She has been invited to Sunday lunches, and she goes sometimes, and she is good company, and then she comes home and there is a particular quality to the evening afterward that she does not talk about.

The difficulty is that receiving is a different action from serving, and she has been serving for fifty years and receiving for none of them, and a woman who has been the strong one in a room since she was twenty-four does not know how to be the one somebody brings a plate to.

It is not pride. It is unfamiliarity, and it is deep, and it will take longer than one Sunday.

You are permitted to be fed, and the household is already yours, and receiving was never the lesser half of belonging. It is written that God sets the solitary in families, and the Holy Spirit is the one who teaches a woman to be a member of a house she has been holding up.