The Form Had a Line on It and He Made Something Up

He was nine when the form came home from school.

There was a line on it that said father's name. He sat at the kitchen table with a pencil and looked at that line for a long time. He knew a name. He had heard it once, from an aunt, in a conversation he was not supposed to be in. He was not sure if he had it right. He was not sure if it was even spelled that way.

He wrote it down anyway, because the form needed something in the box, and then he handed the form in and nobody ever said one word about it.

That was a long time ago. He is grown now. What he has noticed since is that a lot of things in his life are still built around that line. How he is with people. What he expects them to do eventually. The way he can feel himself getting ready for somebody to leave about two weeks before they do anything at all.

He cannot picture the man. That is the part that is hard to explain to people who can.

God gives Himself a name for this

There is a line in the Psalms where God is described by what He does for a specific kind of person.

A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation. (Psalm 68:5, King James Version)

Read what that is. It is not a promise about the future. It is a title. It is one of the ways God is described, right there in the middle of a song about His power.

Not a father to people in general. A father of the fatherless. He picks that group on purpose and He names Himself by it.

And He says it again through Hosea, at the end of a long book about people who had walked out on Him:

for in thee the fatherless findeth mercy. (Hosea 14:3)

You are the one He named Himself for. That is Psalm 68 as it stands, and it is His Spirit who takes a title on a page and makes it something a person can actually feel standing behind them.

The word Jesus used

Right before He left, Jesus said something to His friends that gets translated a bit softly in most Bibles.

I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you. (John 14:18)

The word behind comfortless is the word for orphans.

He is talking to grown men. He is not making a point about children. He says it because that is exactly what it feels like when the one person who was holding everything together is gone, and He wanted to say the strongest possible version of that is not what is happening here.

I will come to you. Not send word. Not arrange something. Come.

You are not being left. John 14 is written down in His own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described in that same conversation as the one He was sending to make it true.

Somebody was there the whole time

This is the part that undoes people, and it is worth reading slowly.

For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made... Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them. (Psalm 139:13-16)

Somebody was present at the very start of you. Not watching from a distance. Involved.

In thy book all my members were written. Before there was anything to look at, there were already notes.

Whatever else is true about how you got here, and some of it may be hard, that is also true, and it was true first.

You were not an accident that somebody left behind. Psalm 139 says a great deal about who was in the room at the beginning, and it is His Spirit who makes an old song feel like it is about your actual body.

Adoption is a choice somebody makes

Here is a thing about the word the Bible uses.

Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will. (Ephesians 1:5)

Nobody gets adopted by accident. It does not happen to a family by mistake. Somebody sits down, decides, and then does paperwork about it.

And look at the reason Paul gives. Not because there was a need to fill. Not out of duty. According to the good pleasure of his will. He wanted to.

Then Paul says what it means for what you are called:

And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son. (Galatians 4:6-7)

No more a servant, but a son. That is a change in what you are, not in how you feel about it.

You were chosen on purpose by somebody who wanted to. Ephesians 1 says the reason out loud, and it is the Spirit who is named in Galatians as the one who puts the word Father in a mouth that never got to use it.

The young man nobody was looking for

There is a story in 2 Samuel that almost nobody has heard.

A king asks a question one day. He asks whether anybody is left from the family of a friend of his who died, because he made a promise to that friend a long time ago.

There is one. A young man named Mephibosheth. His feet were damaged when he was five, in the panic when the family fell, and he has been living out in a place called Lo-debar, which was about as far from anything as you could get. He has no standing. He is not expecting anything from anybody.

They bring him in, and he is afraid, and here is what the king says:

Fear not: for I will surely shew thee kindness for Jonathan thy father's sake, and will restore thee all the land of Saul thy father; and thou shalt eat bread at my table continually. (2 Samuel 9:7)

He had done nothing. He had not applied. He did not know the promise existed, and the promise was not even made to him.

And the chapter ends by telling you twice that he ate at the king's table like one of the king's own sons, and it also tells you, in the last line, that he was still lame in both feet.

Both things. He is at the table and he still cannot walk right. Nobody in the story pretends otherwise.

You are wanted at a table you did not qualify for. 2 Samuel 9 tells it plainly and does not tidy up the ending, and it is His Spirit who makes a seat like that feel like a real one.