community Archives - Invitations to Ascend

August 24, 2020September 18, 2020

Belonging part 3 – fractured, fragmented and ineffective?

This morning I was reading Jesus’ prayer for his disciples in John chapter 17. It has taken me a long time to read this chapter. I have been here for weeks. It has been strange for nothing has genuinely struck me and yet I have felt unable to go on. Perhaps that is because I would prefer not to read what happens next? But I suspect that more has been at play.

As the third post in this series on belonging; I hope to bring something further to what we have previously discussed. In the first post, we discussed the yearning to belong, the need to truly meet with others and to prioritise the other in social situations. And Marion so beautifully developed this further here when she wrote about the need to recognise the truth that we do belong – to God, and to others because we belong to him.

July 23, 2020September 18, 2020

Belonging part 2 – an interior work

The need to belong is a fundamental and intrinsic human need. But for some of us we can be our own worst enemies in inhabiting a place of “unbelonging” rather than belonging. Nowhere is this more acute and destructive than in the church, the very collective organism that Jesus described as family. I am asking God to shine a spotlight on what is going on internally within me. I long for the inner rewiring and renewing that I need to move firmly out of a mindset of unbelonging and into belonging.

Alicia recently wrote this beautiful post about belonging. I deeply identify with her longing to belong and her outsider feelings, especially in gatherings. I’m well acquainted with that floundering self-consciousness among a crowd who seem to know a secret to connection I’ve somehow missed. It’s been there as long as I can remember – from the shy, awkward child to the new mum trying to navigate fitting in amid the chaos of little ones. These thoughts, and the feelings of loneliness and self-dissatisfaction that inevitably attach, come up in all settings – work, social situations, and certainly also in church.

June 27, 2020September 18, 2020

Belonging

I love that word. It has the deep sense of home, of warmth, of togetherness. Being in a place and fitting in, somewhere which is mine. But not just mine for in this place there are others to whom it belongs as much as myself. This, I think, is a much better word than community. For we each live within communities that for the most part are dislocated, fractured, and separate – the very antithesis of belonging.

I have often felt like somehow I don’t fit. There are times when I stand in a group of people and feel foreign, strange and disconnected. It as if somehow everyone else shares a secret that I don’t know. That they all stand on common ground, but there is no room for me.