BELONGING ~ 5/11/10

As a missionary kid, I’ve frequently struggled to find my place of belonging. Born in an African country, but not African (My Gabonese friends always wondered about my freckles. Were they a disease? No, I say, they are delayed blackness; when I’m older they’ll all grow together and I’ll be black like you.). Possessing an American birth certificate but feeling homesick every second away from African soil. Able to speak French and sing “Born in the USA” but able to claim neither French heritage nor the right to sing that thoroughly American song. My parents weren’t even born in the U.S.A, for goodness sakes. Neither was one of my grandparents.

Where do I belong?

I was not born here, but now I live here. And so someone innocently asks me, “Where are you from?”—this… is the dreaded question. Eyes glaze over when I bring up Africa, so let’s just say I stick with the continental U.S— which state do I claim? The one my great-grandparents came from? The one where I went to college? The one where I went to seminary? Or the one where I spent my summer vacations while my parents continued their ministry overseas?

Where do I belong?

Either way, I’ve been told I’m living in the wrong state. “You’d probably fit-in better in Alaska,” one person said; ‘maybe in the summers,’ I think. I’ve had people tell me I was born in the wrong time. “You should have lived back in the days of Livingstone,” someone said to me once. Well… as cool as that would be, it doesn’t help me find belonging; dead people have a cold way about them. Someone else even told me I was born in the wrong generation. Now technically, I think I’m part of Generation X, but according to this person, it was clear I related better with the Baby Boomer Generation. ‘Wow,’ I remember thinking—‘I don’t even have a generation.’

Where do I belong?

Maybe you feel this way sometimes. Maybe you feel adrift, or alone, like you don’t fit-in or like you’re not part of anything that matters, part of a loving community or a family that looks like the Norman Rockwell prints on the walls of Hometown Buffet. Maybe you’re a missionary kid like me, or perhaps a pastor’s kid, maybe even a military brat. Maybe your parents moved a lot and you never put down roots. Or maybe you never had a stable family at all. Perhaps you did have a good family, lots of friends, but you’ve burned so many bridges behind you you feel there’s no way back. Your talents aren’t valued, your opinions aren’t respected, your passions aren’t recognized... you feel isolated, and alone.

Where do you belong?

Have you read Romans 7 lately? There’s a simple little verse there, stashed away between several great monoliths of soteriology, that grabs the tossing ship that is my life and anchors me, every time I read it. It goes like this…

4”So, my brothers, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit to God.”

I belong, and you belong, but none of us belongs primarily to a place, or a time, or even to a generation… Primarily, what matters before anything else and shapes everything else and informs everything else about me— who I am and who I will become— is that, as a Child of God, I belong to a person. If you are a Child of God, You belong to a person. And His name is Jesus.

I "belong to another." I belong— to Jesus.

Surrounded By Grace,

Josh