I Did Not Choose Any Of These People

You did not pick one of them.

Not your mother, not your brother, not the one who says the thing at every gathering, not the one who has not asked you a question about your life since about 2019. You were placed among them without consultation and there is no mechanism for revision.

And here is the specific thing I want to name, because it is doing more damage than any individual relative.

You have been living alongside a second family. An imaginary one, made of the same people slightly adjusted: your father with about ten per cent more warmth, your sister without the thing she does, a mother who asks. And every real interaction gets measured against that version and comes up short, every time, for about twenty years.

Two things I am not going to do. I am not going to tell you your family is a gift and that you should be grateful for it. That sentence has been used to keep people quiet in houses where they were being harmed, and I will not put it anywhere near you.

And if what you are actually carrying is not disappointment but harm, if somebody in that house hurts you or frightens you, then nothing in this article is aimed at you, and getting yourself safe and talking to somebody qualified where you live comes first and comes before any of this.

What I am talking about is the ordinary case, which is a family that is not cruel and is not what you wanted.

God setteth the solitary in families

There is half a verse in Psalm 68 that I have thought about for years, and the reason is that it is stated as an act of God rather than an accident.

God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land. (Psalm 68:6, King James Version)

God setteth the solitary in families.

Setteth. Placed. It is put in the same breath as bringing prisoners out of chains, which is to say it is listed among the things God does for people who have nothing.

And notice what it does not say. It does not say God sets people in good families, or in families that will understand them, or in families they would have chosen. It says He does the setting, and it treats being placed among people as itself a mercy toward somebody who would otherwise be alone.

Psalm 68:6 makes the placing an act of God without describing the family as ideal, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that reach somebody who has been treating their household as an administrative error.

You are placed rather than assigned by accident, and the placing has never once required the family to be the one you wanted. Psalm 68:6 says God setteth the solitary in families, listed beside bringing prisoners out of chains, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a placing rather than a sentence.

The second family is the problem

Now the part that will do the actual work, if you let it.

Your grief is not mainly about your family. It is about the gap between them and the version you have been carrying, and that gap is maintained entirely by you, and it is where almost all of the pain lives.

Because the imaginary family cannot fail. It is always warm, it always asks, it never says the thing. And no real person has ever survived comparison with a person who does not exist. Psalm 68:6 places people among the ones who are actually there, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings somebody back into the real room.

Psalm 68:6 sets people in actual houses with actual people in them, and the Holy Spirit is not the author of a better version you have been holding alongside the real one.

Putting the second family down is not resignation and it is not saying the first one is fine. It is deciding to be in the room with who is actually there.

You are able to put down a family that does not exist, and the real one has never once been what was hurting you most. The written word places people in the households that are actually there, and the Spirit of God is the one who gets somebody to stop measuring their mother against a woman nobody has ever met.

One person, one true thing

So here is the assignment, and every word of it is chosen, especially the word true.

Name one person in your family out loud, and thank God for one true thing about them.

True. Not generous, not charitable, not what you would say at a funeral. Something you actually believe. It can be small and it can be strange: he has never once been late for anything. She remembers every birthday. He is genuinely funny about three times a year.

If the only true thing you can find is that they gave you life, or that they stayed, say that. If you cannot find one about a particular person, pick a different person; this is not an exercise in forcing anything.

And say it out loud, by name, to God. Not to them. This is not a conversation you are having with your family, it is a correction to what you have been rehearsing.

Psalm 68:6 has God doing the placing in real households, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a person says one true good thing about a relative out loud.

You are able to name one true thing, and it has never once required you to overlook anything. Psalm 68:6 places people among actual people, and the Spirit of God is the one who is in a sentence said out loud about somebody who has disappointed you for twenty years.