What to Do When You Feel Like a Stranger in Your Own Home

Some of the loneliest people are living in a house full of people. Your spouse is buried in work. The kids are behind a bedroom door with their phones. You get through a whole evening under one roof and exchange maybe forty words, most of them about the schedule. Then you look around at the family you helped build and feel like a guest in it.It's a strange kind of lonely, because you can't point to the thing that went wrong. Nobody fought. Nobody walked out. It came apart slowly over a few years while everybody was busy being responsible.This episode opens with a national AARP survey on loneliness. Researchers asked married people over the age of 45 a simple set of questions, and close to a third of them gave the same answer. They were lonely. These were couples sharing a house and a bed with someone, and feeling alone anyway. Relationship expert Pepper Schwartz described the ache as having a body right next to you while your deepest needs go unseen by the one person who should know you best.Psalm 68:5-6 speaks into that house: "Father to the fatherless, defender of widows, this is God, whose dwelling is holy. God places the lonely in families." Read that line with your own household in mind. God is the one who does the placing, which means He put you there on purpose, and He didn't move out when the warmth did. Look at who He is in those verses. Father to the fatherless. Defender of widows. He goes straight to the people who have nobody, which means the loneliest person at your dinner table already has His full attention.The survey covers marriages, and the ache runs wider than marriage. Plenty of parents feel it with a teenager who used to talk to them. So ask God to change what you have no power to change on your own. You can't reach inside your spouse and make them want you again, and you can't schedule the moment a sixteen-year-old opens up. Then start small. One meal with the television off. One conversation where nobody is holding a phone. Bart shares his own version of this, the years in ministry when he was out of the house most nights, coming home late to a family that had already gone on with the evening without him. He was pastoring other people's families while his own learned to run without him in it, and he calls that a sobering thing to figure out about yourself.BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:What an AARP survey found about loneliness inside marriage The promise in Psalm 68 that is easy to read past Two small changes that give a distant household somewhere to startA home like this can be rebuilt, one small turn toward each other at a time. God placed you in that house, and He is still in it. Be the one who moves first tonight.Share This Episode:https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/323Need Prayer? Leave me a voicemail:https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/voicemailWant to keep these devotions coming? Please consider supporting this podcast.https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/support/Rate and Reviewhttps://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/reviews/new/Connect with BartFacebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/dailydevotionsforbusylivesWebsite: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.comFeeling spiritually drained? Start here. Download your free copy of my eBook Making Time for Jesus here: https://www.dailydevotionsforbusylives.com/subscribe.