Belonging 5
Looking for the Perfect Fit
Trying to Fit Into Someone Else’s Clothes
You know that feeling, the burning desire to make it fit even though you know it won’t? You wiggle; you inhale, and you try just one more time.
Here I sit, a bundle of fur warming my side, basking in the warm glow of the Christmas tree—and it all looks picture-perfect. Yet, I’ve always felt like I inhabit the fringes of life.
Even as I round middle age, I feel like I fit awkwardly into this life I’ve worn for decades like a pair of hand-me-down jeans a little too long for my short legs and too tight around my wide hips.
This year I’ve spent a lot of time exploring who I really am, peeling away the layers of false selves I have worn over the years. We all put them on, that baggy coat to hide our flaws. That glamorous dress to divert their eyes from our insecurities.
Maybe it’s the don’t-care attitude I’ve heard we take on in our later years. Perhaps it’s the liminal space of being back in graduate school and wrestling with a twenty-year-old calling to ministry that has seen its share of detours, diversions, and dead-ends.
Either way, I’ve been throwing off the distortions and trying to find the right fit. And for the first time, I’ve realized I’m not the only fringe-dweller in the spaces I long to find a home.
Getting Naked In Front of Strangers
When I’m nervous and out of place, I ramble. I feel compelled to fill the awkward silence with a lumbering monologue instead. As anxious as I was, I spent a lot of time listening this year instead.
Forced to slow down and seek the wisdom of others as I entered the discernment process with my church, I found myself with others in the same uncomfortable limbo as myself. I was one of a dozen people who felt compelled to pursue a possible journey into ordained ministry. Thrown together in this vulnerable process, we stripped down to our barest selves in front of strangers.
We sat in Zoom rooms and conference rooms, the offices of our church leaders, and in intimidating interviews with Commission on Ministry members. We told our raw and unfiltered stories, with trembling and a few tears.
Trying Jesus on For Size
For me, it was a year of uncovering layers of my complicated history with the Body of Christ. I was a child who didn’t know who the Jesus figure that came out in manger scenes was. I knew there was something important about him and longed to know more. The youth group of my teens nurtured me and then discarded me like an ill-fitting pair of pants.
I was introduced to versions of Jesus who wanted me to do all the right things and ones who loved me like a best friend. There were ones who kept records of my sins in heavenly file cabinets, waiting to judge my failings—and ones who held no record of wrongs. I did my best to decipher who Jesus was when I wasn’t even sure who I was.
I thought I had it all figured out by the time I was on staff at the mega-church I’d spend a large portion of my life in. On the outside, I looked like a perfectly-polished Christian. Husband and two kids, the van, the Christian preschool, and obligatory Insta-worthy birthday parties. I looked just like everyone else so that meant I belonged, right?
Never mind the uneasiness that rattled around my soul, the lack of connection with the Jesus I longed to know intimately, and the theological issues I thought would go away if I ignored them.
It was a beautiful place; it was just not the place I belonged. And I knew it and pretended not to. It was easier that way—until it wasn’t. Until my desperate, dry, lonely soul cried out to move from the fringes to the place where the Spirit could live and move in me...
CONTINUE READING AT THE MUDROOM
We Belong to Each Other. For (in)courage.
Hers was the first familiar face I saw in the sea of unknown that was the airport atrium. Standing back on the soil of my “home” for the first time in a year, I felt uprooted. A week before, my friend only existed as a voice over the phone while I ached for community I hadn’t been able to build yet in my new life in South Asia. America felt like another reality altogether as change pulled me further away.
But a family crisis had yanked me up by my transplanted roots, and there I stood again. Home yet not home. My husband and children stayed behind 8,500 miles away, and my heart was torn between two continents.
I expected to feel out of place after the prolonged absence and adjustment to a new normal. Yet in the smiling face of the friend who had known the depths of my wandering heart for twenty-three years, I felt like no time had passed at all. We became friends over bus rides to band competitions and passing notes in biology class. We saw each other through crushes and crushed hearts, marriage and divorce, chronic illness, and now two international moves. We had shared a house and shared over half our lives.
I had imagined our connection dissolving with time and distance as I complained that I had no friends in my new home. I focused on what I didn’t have and forgot what I did have because it lingered out of sight. Yet there she was with a caramel macchiato she knew to be my favorite in hand. She was a visual reminder that friendship is not erased by time apart and not changed by miles traveled.
When I walked into the ICU waiting room where my whole family was gathered, she quietly melted into the background. She let me cry with my sister, whose husband had just undergone a second emergency surgery for the aneurism that had prompted my unplanned trip around the world. I felt ashamed at my own lack of willingness to be inconvenienced for others when her husband didn’t complain that it was 2am before we pulled into my parents’ driveway.
I was reminded of so much more than the strength of a childhood friendship in those days. Every time she showed up over those two weeks, I was surprised when I shouldn’t have been. Where else but in the everyday needs of life should we expect Christ to show up?...
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Our Collective Sigh of Longing. For the Mudroom.
They say it is winter now but this doesn’t feel like anything I’ve ever known of winter. While others tug their scarves tightly around them the sweat still pools where my purse hits my shoulder. Maybe I’ll get accustomed to the tropical air before the real heat comes early next year. Getting used to the weather is one of the many things I seem to be waiting for these days, just weeks into life in this new country.
I’ve been pondering and praying about what it means to wait so much this year as we prepared to move and were confronted with delays and changes in our plans. When the wheels touched down on the tarmac in South Asia I thought much of our waiting had come to an end. I had no idea just how wrong I was.
I kick around these thoughts just like the stones that my feet break loose as I walk down the uneven path towards the market. I’ve walked this road a few times before but haven’t really been able to observe it. I’ve been watching the rickshaws I need to dodge, jumping as a horn alerts me to the presence of a car behind me. My eyes have been on my kids, making sure they dodge the stray dogs and keep away from the place where the sidewalk has a gaping hole. I’ve been negotiating every step. Today is my first day to the market by myself and I am finally able to slow down and relax into the walk, my thoughts slowing with me.
I navigate the aisles of products I don’t recognize, waiting to feel comfortable here. I pick up something to check the price and sigh. I don’t know how to read the labels yet so I hope this brand of powdered milk is okay. I wonder how long before I don’t feel like a toddler in this place – unable to understand simple words or cultural cues. I can’t grab as much as I need because I can only cart so much back down the dusty street on my own. I’ll wait to come back another time for that ironing board that’s a little too heavy. What’s a few more days with wrinkled clothes when we’ve been living out of a suitcase for months?
As I head back home with too-full bags bouncing off my hips, I take a moment to bask in my little victory. I made it to the store on my own and actually managed to find all the items I needed to cook dinner. My short-lived celebration fades as something inside whispers, “it’s a tiny step towards feeling at home somewhere new.” I know that voice well.
It’s the voice that reminds me I’m always waiting for something, never can seem to feel settled...
Holding Space for Home. {Guest post for Jen Pollock Michel}.
Flat 402
Wara Alkulliat Alharbia
Masr Gadida, Egypt
The miniature plastic house hung limply between two pine branches, the words “Our First Home” engraved on the side. We had brought the Christmas ornament with us to the first home we rented after a year and a half of marriage in which we lived with a friend.
The tree looked like it came straight out of Charlie Brown’s Christmas and the only other signs of celebration in our fourth-floor flat was a bright red poinsettia. Nothing about the day felt like Christmas because even though the Coptic minority celebrated the holiday, the Orthodox Christmas occurred later in January.
After we opened a couple gifts to each other—an onyx encrusted hand drum purchased from the tourist market and a grey flowing robe that local men wore called a gallabaya—we caught a cab to a nearby café that felt a bit like home.
The ancient culture had called to us back when we were living in the Southern United States. We imagined living in the land of the Pharaohs as this thrilling adventure and weren’t disappointed as the melodic Arabic call to prayer became the first soundtrack of our new lives.
In country for three months, the newness had worn off. We learned to say “we aren’t tourists; we live here” in Arabic to street vendors who tried to charge us more than we knew items were worth. But the truth is the dusty landscape didn’t feel much like home yet. We huddled in the cafe, isolated from those around us as we sipped our lattes and nibbled tomato and mozzarella sandwiches that Christmas afternoon, longing for the comfort of something familiar...
Join me at Jen Pollock Michel's blog today as I join the series “Home: Musings and Memories" about search for home—and the God who makes its hope possible.
The Home series is a reflection on Jen's newly released Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home (IVP, May 2017).
Home is something that is on my mind daily in this season of my life, something that holds deep meaning and intense longing. As we pack up our home of six years, as we look towards a new home overseas, as we say good bye to those things that anchor us to what home has meant for most of our lives ... we are constantly reminded that God gave us a longing for place and how to find home in this world and long for it in the next.
Jen Pollock Michel's new book Keeping Place couldn't have been more timely for me and I believe it will be for you as well.
"Home is our most fundamental longing. And for many of us homesickness is a nagging place of grief. This book connects that desire and disappointment with the story of the Bible, helping us to see that there is a homemaking God with wide arms of welcome – and a church commissioned with this same work..."
- Jen Pollock Michel
Fringes {The Longing for Acceptance}
Freckle Face. Carrot Top. Shrimp. Two by Four. Trailer Trash. These were all labels I received as a child.
I have always felt like the odd one out. Look at me and you'd say that is rediculous. I am not a minority (though I have lived in a country where I was, in race, language, and religion). I come from a loving family, have parents that are still together. Middle class, white Christian living in the Bible belt. Outsider. That is crazy.
But growing up I never felt like I fit in. I wasn't one of those "cool kids" and I struggled to belong, my freckled face, red hair and skinny legs screaming, "pick on me!" I bounced from trying to fit in to trying to stand out, anything to be noticed and accepted. I had this gnawing emptiness inside of me, always searching to belong somewhere. Having not grown up in the church, I discovered both Jesus and His Church when I was in high school. Finally, a place to belong...or so I thought.
I didn't know all the right "church" words, didn't know all the Bible stories and songs the kids grew up learning. I didn't know how to say and do all the right things that made me a good youth group kid, but I sure did try. In the process I alienated my family who didn't share my beliefs or desire to belong to the church. I tried so hard to fit into one world that I walked away from the family I did belong to all along. I started dating a guy who was in the group of the "real" youth group kids and I thought I was in...until that relationship went south and I was the pariah of the group I tried to so hard to belong to.[pullquote]
We all have this intimate cry in our hearts for belonging.
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It was the end of summer and I was getting ready to start my senior year, still as lost as ever. I sat on the fringes of the youth group at an outside event we were having. I don't remember any teaching or songs from that night. I just remember the people who called me friend a few short weeks ago sitting together and laughing, excluding me. Every bit of laughter felt like a slight, like it was directed at me.
I walked away from church that night and it would be three years before I returned to the body of Christ, finding a new home at a campus ministry in college. I looked at the people who talked about love on the weekends and walked into school and showed nothing of the love of Christ to the people around them. If that was Christianity, I wanted nothing to do with it.
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