I am fascinated by the fact that King David included this thought in one of his worship songs 3000 years ago. People have always struggled with loneliness. I would think that in our amazing age of technology and information in which we can connect with people across the world with little effort and low cost, that loneliness would be eliminated, eradicated; that it would be an irrelevant topic to be concerned about.
This last October a study was reported from the Harvard School of Education. The research started in 2020, a few months into the pandemic, and concluded May of 2024. In their surveys they found that 36% of Americans (every third person you meet) stated that they felt lonely “frequently, almost all the time, or always.” More specifically (and painfully), “about 40% of these lonely respondents reported that no one in in the past few weeks took more than just a few minutes to ask how they are doing in a way that expressed genuine caring.” (makingcaringcommon.org.)
A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling.
God sets the lonely in families.
I know people in families, for that matter, in marriages, that are lonely. Loneliness is the poverty, the pandemic, of our moment in time, in the USA, in Wimberley, Texas.
Social Services cannot cure it. Marriage and Family Therapy cannot fix it. We as people of faith can and should make an impact, but this phrase in the song of David gives the only solution; the solution that has been available since the writing of the psalm. The only cure to loneliness must be one that is eternal. There is only one solution…and you know what (who) it is.
God sets, places the lonely in his family.
You belong in Him. The apostle John wrote that if you love Jesus and guard his word, the Father will love you and come to you (along with Jesus and the Spirit) and make his (their) home in you. John 14:23.
This is one reason it is called Good News.