Thoughts on Belonging

Dysfunction. It runs through every human endeavor. Whether it be dysfunction among friends beginning with unresolved hurt, or dysfunction within families stemming from addiction or abuse… There’s dysfunction in our government, in our churches, dysfunction in our school board meetings, dysfunction in the check-out line at Walmart, dysfunction between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, and especially dysfunction in our own relationships with our selves, and with God, our Father.

We are a disabled people, incapable of functioning in a healthy, thriving way with each other, with ourselves, and with our Maker. The schisms and inaccuracies and false doctrines and bad advice and lack of understanding and prejudices and beliefs and over and over again wounds run deep. We are like a deaf man, straining to hear the truth with his ears. We are blind, groping about in the dark to find each other and the flourishing in relationship we long for, only to fall flat on our faces.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

Lord, open my eyes so I can see.

Think about it: no person is deposited on this earth alone, completely unattached to other people. Every child, even the one abandoned in the field, owes his existence to a mother person and a father person. Every person is inextricably linked to the human family. We are born for belonging. In the beginning, our lives depend on it. In the end, our lives depend on it, and everywhere in between, our lives depend on it.

We expend our one life here on this earth in search of the belonging we were made for.  

Belonging to one another is both our birthright, and a gift. True belonging is not only a set of feel-good feelings we depend on for courage and confidence, but also a set of practices we enact, helping others to belong. Belonging requires a choice to trust others and risk the consequences. When we risk trust, we risk vulnerability and possible rejection, which is what ultimately deepens our belonging. Successful belonging requires discernment about which relationships and which communities can help us be and see ourselves rightly. Belonging gives us what we yearn for—an exchange of gifts that brings reconciliation. (Parker J. Palmer, Foreword, Lessons in Belonging From a Church-Going Commitment Phobe by Erin S. Lane)

As someone who struggles to attend my church regularly and who balks at participating fully because of my own proclivity to dysfunction and because of the glaring dysfunctions I encounter in others every time I make the effort, I am ready now to accept and affirm that “the demands and vexations of life together don’t have to be the death knell of community. Rather, they serve as doorways in to deeper relationship as we work through our disillusionments with community, others, and ourselves (Palmer).”

Belonging is a work in progress. We are in this for the long haul. Dysfunction and unbridled disillusionment serve to erect walls and drive in wedges between us and our goal, which is unity in belonging to one Family. But I believe as we endeavor to choose to press in anyway, these wedges will become more like splinters, and then splinters will be more like hairs, and hairs like flecks of dust, and flecks of dust like air. Because, ultimately, we desperately need each other, and, thankfully, our God in His design and His provision will guide us into the belonging He made us for, in spite of ourselves.