She sat in a chair across from me with her legs crossed underneath her. Her hair was wet from the rain, her shoes sitting on the floor in front of her were shiny from the water beading up the patent leather.
As I asked her about her life she began telling me all about the new things she was excited about doing. I listened and the word "community" kept creeping into her sentences. She wants it, she's thinking it could come from some of the things she's looking at involving herself with, she needs it, she doesn't have it right now.
The words continued to tumble out like the blocks in the big container my little girls play with after school, falling onto the floor one after the other making a jumble of color on the carpet.
Slowly the building blocks of words began to take shape and her eyes filled with tears as the reality of the picture emerged and I named it. "You've lost your community, you've lost your church."
"I don't know where I belong anymore. What was the place I belonged is gone now, and I don't have the energy to go looking for another place."
He sat in a chair in the circle of eight people. He was quiet and pensive. He began talking about the loneliness in the midst of his busy life. The activities for his kids, the men's bible study he attends, work, the couples he and his wife meet occasionally for dinner, none of it touching this lonely place inside of him.
He says that he's told his wife he wants more with her, more connection, she hears he wants more sex. He says this feeling of loneliness feels familiar.
He just wants to know he belongs somewhere, that he's known and that he matters.
Belonging.
It takes time to know you belong. Layers of who you are have to be explored and validated by those around you. Time has to be spent, time having fun, time sharing stories, time sharing meals, time growing with one another.
Belonging is what happens in a community, not just a group someone names as a community. To feel like I belong I have to have regular contact with people beyond once a month or occasional lunches after church. It takes more than a phone call, I need faces in my community, faces with eyes that say I belong and words that reach into my heart. Belonging feels good. Belonging will cost me the busyness that invades my days, and will require some stillness and the expression of my soul.
Belonging .... to "be" with others, really "be", is what I long for.