Let me tell you about the last two weeks. It feels like we have circumnavigated the globe with a toddler in tow. We were one rental car loaded down with bags and a haul of goldfish crackers to rival any episode of Deadliest Catch. I've packed and re-packed bags and settled into strange beds and settled a wee girl into her pack-n-play in closets and corners strung across five states.
I've hugged family, blog friends, old friends and new acquaintances. We've shared about our missionary journey and vision for ministry and it has been good and hard and a whole lot of flinging our hearts out into the wind for anyone who wants to see.
We finally returned home two weeks and two days later. It was 9pm and the car had to be unpacked and we had a little girl who just wanted to stretch her legs and pull out every book, every toy, every thing that belongs to her. You could just see it in every muscle of her face. She was home and content to the core.
She had been carried along on this journey and she had been mostly compliant. Yes, we did purchase earplugs at one point because the constant screaming of "Maaaamaaaaaa" from the back seat was becoming a bit too much, but she was mostly compliant which is really all you can ask from a toddler.
I have struggled again and again with a sense of belonging. Always falling on a feeling that I don't and that no amount of preparing, primping or priming the pump of life will make me fit in to this world. All I know is that when I looked in my girl's tiny face last night I realized that I have created, even in a double wide trailer, a space for her to belong.
Somehow in all my desperate longing for belonging I have made a place for someone else to belong and in so doing I feel with a deep sense that I am where I belong. Often we wait for someone to make a place for us to belong, but I never realized that giving that gift to someone else is what creates that connection in my own heart.
I'm of the opinion that most of us are looking for a place to belong. We are looking for a full-time pass to sit at the "cool kids" table without a second thought. But that isn't the world we live in. We are a world of exclusive clubs and gated communities and we love to decide who stays and who goes- I mean Survivor, the Bachelor, American Idol...need I go on?
What if the balm to the hearts of the un-belonging is for us all to make spaces for each other to belong?
What if the way I find a place to belong is by giving you a space to be?
Jesus had a group of disciples and I think they might have been misfits. They were smelly fishermen, a tax collector, a super smart doctor type and maybe none of them had ever felt like they fit, but He gave them that. He called them out and said "Come, follow me and I'll give you a place and a purpose."
We can offer that to one another because Christ has offered that to us.
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