He Sets the Lonely in Families

(written September 7, 2008)

I had a great time in Logan this weekend. Mark and I went down to attend a reception for a good friend of mine from high school (she was married in Seattle last month and had a reception in Logan for people who couldn’t make it out west). I kept thinking that I wanted to write a post about the weekend for my blog, even though it wasn’t really related to adoption stuff. But after thinking about it for a while, I realized it isn’t as unrelated as I thought.

A verse kept coming to mind today on our way home. “God sets the lonely in families”. This has been remarkably true for me, in every stage of my life, pretty much ever since my dad left. In junior high I had some friends with whom I really connected. They “got me”, at a time when I really needed to be got. I lost touch with them after I moved away in 8th grade, but in the last year have sort of reconnected through Facebook. One of those friends even said to me when she found me on FB that I was someone she just couldn’t get out of her head. There was a connection that seems pretty rare for a couple of junior high kids who haven’t really kept in touch in the last 20 years.

That move from Virginia to Ohio in junior high was extremely difficult for me. But, again, God provided abundantly. For one thing there was family—my grandparents and aunt and uncle took in my mom and siblings and me for a few months until my mom could get on her feet, and that is something I will always be grateful for. But God went even beyond that. My mom was at that time in school to become a nurse and was working as much as she could, and my siblings were responding in their own ways to the upheaval we had all undergone. I was pretty lonely. But I got involved in the youth group at my grandma’s church. There were about 10-15 of us who spent weekends at the Hayward’s cabin, went whitewater rafting in Pennsylvania, attended summer camp at Geneva Hills, and met together on Sunday mornings to talk about, among other things, what it meant to be Presbyterian. Several of us ended up on the track and cross country teams together, or performing in the high school musicals. Although there was still a lot of teen angst going on for me at the time, for the first time in my life I felt like I finally belonged.

I saw several of those friends this weekend. It was wonderful. I have kept in touch with some of them to varying degrees over the last 15 years. Repeatedly, I have the experience of getting together with those friends, maybe for the first time in 6 months or 2 years or 5 years, and it seems like no time has passed. I know we have changed a lot—we have moved to far-off places and gotten married and come out and had kids, finished graduate school and switched careers, and I’m sure we have matured and changed our views on faith and values (and what it means to be or not to be Presbyterian). But there is still something that stays exactly the same. It has to be something beyond just the fact that we’ve known each other for so long and have so much history. I haven’t talked to too many other people who have such a connection with friends from high school. It truly seems supernatural.

I see this as God’s way of setting me in a family. My own family was going through some serious struggle, so these friends, and even their parents to some extent, became a surrogate family for me. (Many of my friends’ parents were at the reception, and they gave me hugs and said how good it was to see me and reminisced about experiences from my high school days that I can’t even remember—I felt so known and loved). Maybe each of us in that youth group had some special need for a surrogate family, so God brought us all together. Seeing those friends is always such a blessing.

As I look back, I can see that I have not been without these kinds of families since those youth group days. I sometimes complain about my “lack of community”, but these experiences have just led me to have high expectations. In college there were my fellow-WCFers, after college there were my InterVarsity staff colleagues, and when I left IV I married into a wonderful family—and whether I move far away or switch jobs, that one will be as permanent as my own family. God’s abundance is amazing.

So as I think about all this, I am reminded that it is God’s plan to place a baby who doesn’t even know she is lonely yet into our family. There are so many people, besides me and Mark, who, I know, can’t wait to meet her. I hope that she always has that sense of belonging that I have gained with my own “adoptive” families—with me and Mark, her grandparents and cousins, and all of these people out there whose friendships I treasure more than anything else.