A headline came across my feed this week that I read twice, because the math in it stopped me. An actor and his wife spent close to twenty years working toward one idea: a village of homes in California where brothers and sisters in foster care could stay together instead of being split up and scattered across different households. Not a fundraiser. Not a campaign. Two decades of permits, land, money, meetings, delays, and starting again. And it just opened.
Twenty years is a long time to hold onto something you cannot yet see. Most of us struggle to hold onto a diet for twenty days. What makes a person keep showing up to a thing that long?
The ache behind the project
You do not need to know anything about foster care to feel the point. A child loses almost everything in a placement — house, street, school, bedroom, the smell of home. And then, too often, the last thread gets cut too: the sister who knows the same stories, the brother who remembers the same kitchen. Somebody looked at that thread and said, that one we are going to protect.
Scripture says God looks at exactly that thread. "A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling. God sets the lonely in families, he leads out the prisoners with singing" (Psalm 68:5-6). Read that slowly. Of all the ways the psalmist could have described the Almighty — thunder, armies, mountains shaking, and he does get to that — he stops here and calls God a father to children who have none, and says God's instinct with a lonely person is to put them in a family.
Not to give them a program. Not to give them a pamphlet and a pat on the back. A table. A place where somebody notices you did not come to dinner.
God's long obedience, and ours
Here is what struck me about the twenty years. God did not seem to be in a hurry, and the couple did not quit anyway. That gap — between the size of the calling and the speed of the results — is where most good things die. It is also where most of us live.
You have prayed for that son for eleven years. You have shown up to the same classroom of squirming six-year-olds since before some of them were born. You have carried a burden for a neighborhood, a family member, a ministry, and there is nothing on the ground yet that you can photograph. Paul writes to the Galatians, "Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up" (Galatians 6:9). Notice he does not promise a fast harvest. He promises a proper time, and he assumes weariness is the real enemy — not opposition, not lack of resources. Weariness.
I will say plainly what I see in the life of a church: the Holy Spirit is very good at sustaining people through long stretches with no visible fruit. That is one of His quieter works and one of His most important. When somebody keeps loving a hard person for a decade, keeps praying at 11 on a Tuesday morning for a situation that has not budged, keeps setting a place at the table for somebody who may not come — that is not natural stubbornness. That is God supplying something. Ask Him for it. He gives it.
The family you were put into
There is a second half to that verse worth hearing if you have ever felt like the odd one out in a room full of believers. God sets the lonely in families. The church is meant to be one of the places He does it. Not a crowd you attend — a household you belong to, where somebody knows whether you ate this week.
That is part of why Communion this Sunday, September 20, matters more than a moment in the service order. It is a family meal. Jesus did not hand out individual portions to strangers passing through; He sat down with people He was making into brothers and sisters. When the bread comes around, you are being told something true about yourself: you were brought in. You are not a case file. You are not visiting.
Maybe your own long project has gone quiet and you are tired of waiting. You are allowed to be tired. But do not read the silence as absence. The Father who keeps siblings together keeps you together too, and He has never once forgotten a name at His table — least of all yours.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.