Up until you were 18 years old, the vast majority of your friendships were entirely arranged. Classes, teachers, and seats were assigned to you. You made best friends by having the same schedule, playing the same sport, or having parents who were friends with each other.
Your life as a child was also on display. People knew what your house looked like because they had the same bus stop as you, they knew who you dated because they saw whose hand you were holding in the hallways, and they knew you had a sister because you shared a last name. The people around you didn’t just see you every day — they knew intimate details about you.
But then you graduated, and your friends went away to different schools across the country. Or maybe you got injured, and a decade of being on the same team ended. Maybe your room at home became a storage closet. All of a sudden, you’ve found yourself in a 9-5, sitting in a metal cubicle with an off-white laminate desk, feeling as if no one in the world truly knows or sees you. Your boss of three years found out you have a sister yesterday, and your coworker got engaged when you didn’t even know they were dating anyone. You see people your age on social media with friend groups, going on trips around the world, and eating food around dimly lit dinner tables together, and it feels as if everyone else in the world belongs somewhere except you. What happened to the vision we all had of what a friend group in our 20s and 30s would look like, influenced by those sitcoms we grew up watching? How did we get here — asking people who don’t even know our middle name to be in our weddings or at our birthday parties?
I reached the loneliest point in my life when I was a sophomore in college. All of my friends from high school had gone off to different universities, I was working 30 hours a week on top of having a full class load, and I really only had three people in my phone that I could call. But when I went home for the summer, my mom had started going to a local church, and for the first time in a long time, I noticed that she had a community of people who loved her and knew her. I wanted people to know me the way people knew my mom. So, I decided I would look for a church when I went back to school in the fall with the pure intention of finding community.
I didn’t know it then, but this decision would change the trajectory of my entire life. I went to church wanting to make friends, and what I found was a home and a family.
If you resonate with this and are searching for people or a place to belong to here are three truths about belonging to cling to on this journey to be fully known, loved, and seen, and how the Church specifically meets that very longing.
1. You belong to God.
It’s not a matter of if people will fail you, but when. Your pastor may let you down. Your spouse may dishearten you. Your friends may disappoint you. But we must tether ourselves to the only one capable of holding us without ever letting us fall—Jesus.
He has chosen us since before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4), forming us in our mother’s womb (Jeremiah 1:5). We are precious and honored in His sight, and He loves us (Isaiah 43:4).
But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.
1 Peter 2:9
He has chosen you, and you are His, and we must know and understand this above all else.
2. You belong with others.
That gnawing feeling you have of wanting to belong to something or someone is biblical. God created us with the purpose of being with others, and we see that in the second chapter of scripture.
God said about creation that it was very good (Genesis 1), but then we see a shift:
The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
Genesis 2:18
In the story of creation, the only time God said something was not good was when man was alone. This wasn’t an accident. We were not meant to do life on our own.
Instead of trying to find a way to be at peace with our loneliness, we must embrace the fact that we need people. We need people, family, and a home to belong to.
3. You belong in the family and the House of God.
I don’t know what your experience is with church, but the Church is meant to be a place for the broken, lost, and hurting. A place where anyone and everyone can be welcomed. A place where judgment is staved off and justice is coveted. A place where the orphan finds refuge and the marginalized finds worth and value.
I want to acknowledge that this may not have been your experience. We live in a broken and fallen world, filled with imperfect people, and where sin exists, there is evil. Maybe you went to a church with people who cast judgment instead of compassion when they promised security, or maybe you felt overlooked in a sea of people. Whatever the case, you can be encouraged to know that even if you felt hurt by the actions of others, those people and buildings don’t have the power to define the Church as a whole. The Church is where you will find healing from hurt.
Ephesians 2:19 says, “Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household.” We aren’t just visitors offered a place to stay for a few nights — we are invited to be members of His Household. So, claim your room. Commit yourself to a church, because it’s where you belong — you have citizenship here.
The best way I can explain how the church met my deepest need for belonging was slowly and then all at once. Person after person entered my life, healing different parts of me that I didn’t even know were broken. For the first time ever, I had mentors keeping me accountable, friends contending for me, and strangers praying for me. The Church suddenly became my main source of community and belonging.
You don’t have to go to the church I went to in college to experience belonging. It wasn’t just the church in Florida I attended; it was the church I would attend for the next six years in Georgia, the church I attended once in South Carolina, and the church I will attend in a foreign country. The Church isn’t confined to a state, country, continent, or even hemisphere; it’s everywhere we gather in the name of Jesus, which means that as believers, no matter how remote a village we live in, we have a place to belong: with others whose sole purpose is to glorify the Father. That is the Church.
When we gather together as two or more believers in a large building, the parking lot of a shopping center, in the intimate space of a home, or even behind the metal bars of a prison, the Church is alive, and it will meet you in your loneliness.
As the Church meets our longing for community, we will also come to understand that community isn’t about having a picture-perfect friend group or about sharing the same music tastes. It’s about having people around you who pray for you earnestly when your parent dies, contend for you when you face the temptations of this world, bring you a hot meal when you fall ill, or help raise your future children to be more like Jesus.
The Church is there to be a light in your darkest moments. When we find a home and family within it, loneliness no longer holds us captive, and we can live freely knowing that when the waves of life attempt to overwhelm us, the Church will guide us to the anchor who is firm and steady: Jesus.
