After 22 years apart, a homeless woman is reunited with her family
After 22 years apart, a woman who had been living homeless in Carson City, Nevada, was reunited with her family, with help from the local Sheriff's Mobile Outreach Safety Team, which works alongside vulnerable and homeless residents. Two decades of separation ended in a reunion none of them was certain would ever come. A quiet act of outreach gave a lonely woman her family back.
"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."
Few lines in Scripture are as tender as these. God pays special attention to exactly the people the world tends to walk past, the fatherless, the widow, the homeless, the alone, and He names Himself their defender and their parent. A story like this, an isolated woman restored to the family she had lost for twenty-two years, is a small picture of something Scripture says is close to God's heart. He has not forgotten the lonely. He is still, today, in the business of setting them in families and leading the captive out with singing.
Father to the fatherless, defender of the lonely, thank You that no one is forgotten by You. For everyone who feels alone today, draw them in. Set the lonely in families, lead the captive out with singing, and remind each of us that we belong to You. Amen.