The Helper of the Fatherless

“Thou hast seen it; for thou beholdest mischief and spite, to requite it with thy hand: The helpless committeth himself unto thee; Thou hast been the helper of the fatherless.” — Psalm 10:14 (ASV)

In the late 1830s some freed Yoruba in Sierra Leone sailed home and found that their scattered people had built a new city, Abeokuta, among huge granite rocks. Some of them were Christians, and they asked for missionaries. In August 1846, after eighteen months stuck on the coast, Crowther walked into Abeokuta.

He had been there less than three weeks when news came that he could hardly believe. His mother was alive, living with his sisters in a nearby town. He sent for her. On 21 August 1846 he wrote in his journal:

“The text for to-day in the Christian Almanac is ‘Thou art the Helper of the fatherless.’ I have never felt the force of this text more than I did this day, as I have to relate that my mother, from whom I was torn away about five-and-twenty years ago, came with my brother in quest of me. When she saw me she trembled. She could not believe her own eyes. We grasped one another, looking at one another in silence and great astonishment, while the big tears rolled down her emaciated cheeks.”

She held his hand and called him by the pet names his grandmother used to use. “We could not say much,” he wrote, “but sat still, casting many an affectionate look towards each other, a look which violence and oppression had long checked.” His two sisters, captured with him all those years ago, were alive too. “I had given up all hope, and now, after a separation of twenty-five years, without any plan or device of mine, we were brought together again.”

Her story was brutal. For much of those twenty-five years she had been a slave. By one family account she was kidnapped and sold more than once, until a daughter scraped together enough cowrie shells to buy her back. Now she was old and thin, and her son came back to her as a clergyman with a message about a God she didn’t know. At first she still worshipped the old gods, and believed her dead husband’s spirit had brought her son home. Then she fell ill, and afterwards told him: “all my hopes are in the Lord Jesus Christ, whom now I serve.” In February 1848 she was baptised, taking the name Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel.

When he warned her that his work would keep him travelling, she said: “You are no longer my son, but the servant of God, whose work you must attend unto without any anxiety for me.” She lived about thirty-seven more years. When she was dying in 1883, with her son far up the Niger, she told her granddaughter not to write and worry him.

Psalm 10 is not a gentle psalm. It is angry about the violent and the oppressors who drag the poor away in their nets. “Thou hast seen it,” it says to God. That is the point: God sees. He saw the raiders and the slave-dealers. He did not forget a boy torn from his mother, or the mother who lost him. And sometimes, “without any plan or device” of ours, he brings back what we thought was gone for ever.

One thing to do this week: if someone in your life is “fatherless” in any sense, alone, grieving, cut off from family, do one practical thing for them this week: a message, a meal, an invitation, your time. Be part of the way God helps the fatherless.