You belong: The deep need to be known and loved

Growing up, I was very shy, and I spent much of my childhood and young adulthood feeling like an outsider.

To be honest, I was so quiet that I was boring. Who wants to be friends with someone who never says anything?

When I became a pastor, I discovered that I was often still an outsider, because people tend to hold pastors at a distance. After all, no one wants to have a wet blanket clergy ruin their fun.

One person described it like this, “I’m always the kid, my nose pressed against the window, looking at everyone inside having a good time.

Perhaps you too know what it is like to be an outsider. Maybe you are an observer who sees the life of the party but could never be that way.

Or maybe you’re an elderly person who has become seemingly invisible to the culture that loves youthfulness.

Maybe you’ve walked into a room and felt instantly out of place, unsure if you’re welcome.

Much of Dr. Brené Brown’s research has been on the human need to belong. She says that belonging is a deep, and profound need that humans have.

This happens throughout our lives -making friends on the playground in nursery school, trying out for the band or sports teams in high school, pledging a sorority or fraternity in college, looking for a spouse to whom we will always belong – all the way to end the of our lives. We even want to be buried in the place we belong.

In her research, Brown has interviewed thousands of people and one thing they share are the excruciating stories of not belonging, much like the example of a 40-year-old woman who when she was very young, became an orphan.

She wasn’t a pretty child, and no one seemed to want her. She longed for a family, thinking about it day and night.

But everything she did seemed to go wrong -perhaps trying too hard, because the people who came who came to look her over would always drive away.

Then one day, the head of the orphanage told her that a family was coming to take her home with them. She was so excited that she jumped up and down and cried. The matron reminded her that she was on trial and that this might not be a permanent arrangement.

Overwhelmed with joy, the little girl just knew that it would be. So she went with this family and started school.

She said, “I was the happiest little girl you can imagine and life began to open for me just a little. But then one day, a few months later, I skipped home from school and ran into the front door of the big old house we lived in. No one was at home, but there in the middle of the front hall was my battered old suitcase with my little coat thrown across it. As I stood there and looked at my suitcase, it slowly dawned on me what it meant. I did not belong here anymore.”

While most of us have not experienced anythng so dramatic, we can still understand what it means to not belong, to be an outcast, to be an outsider.

Sometimes we try so hard to belong that we fit in instead. We give up pieces of our identity, perhaps even our values, to gain approval.

Fitting in is a shallow substitute for belonging. Brown says it like this: “If I get to be me, I belong. If I have to be like you, I fit in….Belonging is being accepted for you. Fitting in is being accepted for being like everyone else.”

We do not have to give up our identity and our values in God, who created us as we are, to be as God intended us to be.

No matter if we do not belong to anyone or any group, Jesus offers belonging to us.

Just a few weeks before his execution by the Nazis in 1945, theologian and Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a poem which asked the question who he was.

Was he strong and faithful and brave like people said; or weak and faithless, like he felt about himself? The poem ends like this: Who am I? …Am I one person today and tomorrow another? Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others, And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling? Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am Thine! (From Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Prison Poems, p. 41ff).

And Bonhoeffer is exactly right. There is something that matters much more than who you are: Whose you are. You belong to God.

Throughout his earthly ministry Jesus ministered to people who never felt like they belonged – lepers, tax collectors, outcasts, notorious sinners – and he assured them that they belonged to God. And this is true for you.

And that is the good news of the gospel – you belong. May you know today, even in your loneliness or strangeness, that you belong to God-and that is enough.

About the author: Rev. Sharon Smith is a Pastor at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, a writer, and recovering shy kid who once believed being quiet made her boring – but now she preaches, teaches and occasionally startles extroverts with some dry wit.

She ministers to misfits, geeks, tottering elders and bumbling teens, the overlooked, the over-it and anyone else who’s ever felt like the last one picked for kickball.

Sharon firmly believes that Jesus would totally sit with the outsiders at lunch.

Contact Sharon at tct@pageone-inc.com