June 12th, 2020: Our Need for Belonging
Belonging is an aspect of human life that many of us yearn for. I
have met people from various walks of life who struggle with a lack of
belonging. Somehow it is more common a struggle than we know considering
all of the social media interaction we have.
I
finally caught up with the daughter of a friend after more than a week
of trying to connect. I first met her when she came to one of my bible
studies on campus more than twenty years ago. She was a shy and very
tender-hearted young lady. She is married now and together she and her
husband have 4 children. I love their kids because they are full of
questions and one of them, in particular, would wait for me to come and
then show me her list of questions. She is 12 years old.
The
mom has decided to go back to school and now is in her 2nd year of
nursing school. When we talked, she told me that she felt bad for
feeling as if she does not belong anywhere in particular. She doesn't
want to sound like her husband is neglecting her and she doesn't enjoy
her kids. "Does that make any sense at all?", she asked me.
I
reminded her of a conversation we had many years ago when she was in
her first-year university. It was about the paradox of caring deeply for
the world we live in and yet have a clear understanding that we not
defined by it. So in some ways, the more we care about the people in our
life, the less we become dependent on what they have to offer. We learn
to be free from many entanglements of the world. We then discover a new
understanding of belonging and in that very understanding, we can feel
very alone emotionally and spiritually in this world. We now enter the
part of our life journey where no one can walk with us except God
himself.
"You mean our need for belonging is
no longer based on what this world has to offer?", she continued with my
thoughts. I laughed and told her that you knew the answer before you
asked me. Our sense of belonging now is defined by our willingness to
identify with God and his compassion for our suffering world. One might
say that it is a Christian faith expression of "quantum entanglement".
(Jeremiah 33:3)
"Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known."
