In today’s society, it is hard to find a place to fit in. With clubs, groups, family, church, and so many other sources for us to plug our lives into, why do we find it so difficult to find a place to belong?
Family
You can see that within your own family it sometimes becomes a struggle or even an effort to feel like apart of the union. With the rate of divorce at an all time high in America, and families divided from here to yonder, it could make one feel that your family is not a place to belong.
Support Groups
How about support groups? You have everything from how to express your feelings to how to find love in your marriage. Trying to sort through your life’s journey to find what you need, can become mind boggling to the point of ending stretch out on the psychiatrist’s long leather couch.
Career
Then you have your work environment, which brings you to your co-workers. This all depends though on where you set morals and values within your own life. With the fact that if you work eight hours a day, five days a week, which averages out to a total of 40 hours with these individuals, you begin to know something about their lives, sometimes too much. However, if you add up the remaining time that you have left through the week to spend with your family you begin to realize that something just does not add up. With housework, children, and the long awaited rest that you need, you seem to become disconnected from the unity of your family. Therefore, it may seem, you know more about, and spend more time with your co-workers than your own family. Which leads to the week nights and weekends when your peers want to go out on the town you might find yourself willing to give in since you may know more about them than your own family.
Church
Now you come to the place where you want to belong but still seem to find it as hard as a camel to fit through the eye of a needle: the local church. You have youth ministries, couple’s ministry, marriage counseling and many other areas where you can find to plug in your soul. If this is the case, than why do you also feel like you do not belong here either?
Points to Ponder
Could it be as a human we come to a point within our lives that society, groups, families, and yes, even church has hurt us to the point that we build up walls around our hearts to protect it from feelings of loneliness and not belonging?
With so many labels and judgments that society places on people today, it starts to take affect on our emotions, character, even our identity of who we really are and where we want to belong.
We all want to find that place of acceptance, closeness, and belonging. However, society paints a distorted picture of us when we really do find that place of utopia.
With so many wonderful places to choose from it brings us to the question, where do you belong?
The Place of Belonging
Finding the proper place to feel loved, wanted, and acceptance could seem like an unfulfilling task.
When Jesus Christ came to Earth, He felt and experienced the same pains, struggles, and trials that we all face in our everyday lives. Jesus experienced much more than we could ever imagine. Born in a manger had to be a humbling experience. Riding upon a donkey into the city, which He wept over, showed a great example of meekness and self-control.
Upon His time of death he experienced every pain, guilt, loneliness, failure, rejection, and abandonment as He cried “My God, My God, why have thou forsaken me?”
Jesus found it very hard to find a place to belong within a world that did not want someone to show them how to find a better way and an abundant life for which we all search (John 1:10).
With a short 33 years of a perfect example of humanity, Jesus knew we all wanted to find a place to belong and as we ask the question today, Jesus is standing with arms wide-open saying, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). Accepting yourself and placing God as the focus of your life makes navigating waters of everyday life easier.
[Kevin Moore, 29, has been working with troubled youth for over eight years. He’s presently the Youth Leader and Sunday school teacher at his home church.]READ MORE LIFE | POST COMMENTS BELOW
