The Session She Stopped Going To

Tuesdays, ten till eleven, three lanes roped off and the rest of the pool given over to a session that is officially for adults and unofficially for the same eleven women who have been coming since it started.

There is a slow lane that is not slow. There is a woman of eighty-one who does more lengths than anybody and has done since the beginning and will not be drawn on it. There is a lifeguard who has learned all their names and gets teased about a haircut.

Afterward there is a cafe upstairs with a view of the car park and terrible coffee, and about half of them go up, and that is really the session.

She stopped in February.

Not dramatically. She missed one, and then there were two weeks where genuinely she could not have gone, and then a Tuesday came when she could have gone and did not, and that Tuesday is the one that mattered although nobody including her noticed it at the time.

It is August now.

And here is the thing she has not said to anybody. She still knows the timetable. She could tell you what is on at ten past six on a Thursday. She looks at the leisure center website more than a person who goes there would, and she has done that for six months, and she could not tell you why except that it is a way of being somewhere without being there.

Sit down with me a minute. Today I am speaking to the one who did something, some time back, took it to God straight and meant it entirely, and stopped going to things.

And before you brace: nobody here is setting you a pace. Stopping going is not a sin, nobody on this site will call it one, and there is no timetable for a return anywhere in this message.

God has a habit, and this is it

There is a line in Psalm 68 that reads like a passing remark and is actually a statement about what God does for a living.

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

Read the verb tense. Not God once set. Not God will set. He sets. It is a present habit, a standing practice, the sort of thing you say about somebody when you are describing their character rather than an event.

And read what is on either side of it in that psalm. He is a father of the fatherless and a judge of the widows, and He brings out prisoners. Every single one of those is about somebody who ended up outside a household by no arrangement of their own, and every single one of them is put back in by God's own doing.

Solitary is not a category God leaves alone. It is one of the categories He is specifically known for acting on.

You are the kind of person God has a standing habit of putting into households, and you were never a case He would overlook. I am not offering you a warm sentiment. The written word puts the verb in the present and puts the doing in God's hands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it to a woman looking at a leisure center website in August.

The arranging was never yours

Here is what I want you to notice, and it is a relief once you see it.

You have been treating this as an arrangement you would have to make. Get up on a Tuesday, get in the car, go in, and manage whatever happens in the foyer, and manage the cafe upstairs afterward, and manage the moment where somebody says where have you been.

That is a great deal of managing for one Tuesday, and no wonder it has been six months.

But the verse does not say the solitary arrange themselves into families. It says God sets them there. That is His verb and His hands, and the whole of your part is small enough to carry.

You are being placed by God rather than asked to place yourself, and you were never the one responsible for arranging your own belonging. Scripture puts the setting in His hands, and it is His Spirit, not a plan made on a Monday night, who gets a person through a door.