Belonging

Belonging is such a deep need of the human spirit. Whilst God wants us to be confident in our individual significance, He made us to need the security of being a part of an eternal family where we can be absolutely sure of unconditional acceptance.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, our heart longs to know a settled place of kinship and familiarity, a place where we feel at home, included, affirmed and supported, a place where we just know that we fit. As we grew up through childhood, God intended that we would discover the pathway to meeting this need through the experience of a secure earthly family, loved and nurtured by a mother and father, who would reflect the character of God and point us towards the security of being part of a greater divine household.

Sadly, such an upbringing has not been the experience of many of us. As a consequence, many of us have been unconsciously motivated to seek an alternative place of belonging in whatever the world can offer, through membership, for example, of fan clubs, sport’s teams, charitable organisations, social media groups, political activists, communities promoting particular sexual lifestyles, street gangs, social cliques, religious ideologies, fashion groups, “drop-out” cultures and countless other quasi-families. Of course these are not, by any means, all bad, and it is right for us to enjoy the fellowship of others in appropriate life-styles and pastimes, but none of these will fully meet the cry of the heart to belong to something that is absolutely right, unconditionally loving and truly unending.

God’s household is the only real answer to that heart-cry.

Despite the waywardness of humanity, if we choose to be true followers of Jesus, we each have a right of membership in the precious family of God (John 1:12). In this place there can be redemption and restoration from all the lack of belonging experienced in our lives. Spiritually speaking, we can then take off our shoes, settle into a comfy chair, breathe a sigh of relief and say, “Here I am loved, here I am significant, here I belong.”