life on planet earth on Belonging

The best of community does give one a deep sense of belonging and well-being; and in that sense community takes away loneliness.

Home is ultimately not about a place to live but about the people with whom you are most fully alive. Home is about love, relationship, community, and belonging, and we are all searching for home.

Those who have a strong sense of love and belonging have the courage to be imperfect.

We were created to communicate, to speak truth fully to one another, so that we might be members of one another. To be members of one another means we must learn to trust one another. Trust, like trut...

In her book Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home , Jen Pollock Michel reflects on the nature of home in a transient age. In this short excerpt, Michel focuses on etymology of home in v...

Break our hearts, Jesus That we may weep as You weep Love as You love Break our hearts Jesus and raise our voices that we may speak and act so all may be safe so all may have opportunity so all may k...

Prayer of Confession Jesus, we thirst We thirst for love and belonging We thirst for security and provision We thirst for truth and hope We thirst for healing for our wounds We thirst for mercy for o...

Jesus, you are our peace You proclaim it You create it You bring us near Without you there is No safety No belonging No nurturing No identity rooted beyond this dust Without you we are Anchorless St...

Welcoming One, we welcome you and we welcome another school year. Thank you for the blessings of learning and growing, thinking and creating, reasoning and discovering. Fulfill these blessings in ever...

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, who who creates families for our belonging: We ask for your continual care for the homes in which your people live. Keep them from all bitterness, arrogance, and the...

Children are God’s gifts to immature people to help them grow up. They are also God’s gifts to help parents go deep with God. . . . Parenting is not for anything. It is not a contract with God in whic...

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.

One of the oldest human needs is to have someone to wonder where you are if you don’t come home at night.

There can be more genuine fellowship among those who share the same disposition than among those who share the same beliefs, especially if that disposition is toward kindness and generosity

Some Christians try to go to heaven alone, in solitude. But believers are not compared to bears or lions or other animals that wander alone. Those who belong to Christ are sheep in this respect, that ...

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”

The neighborhood bar is possible the best counterfeit there is to the fellowship Christ wants to give his church. It’s an imitation, dispensing liquor instead of grace, escape rather than reality, but...

Isolated at Christmas It’s an isolating feeling to be on the outside looking in. We’ve all felt it. Some of us especially feel this way at Christmastime. We might relate to Frank Abagnale in the mov...

What’s in a name? The history of the human race is in names. Our objective friends do not understand that, since they move in a world of objects which can be counted and numbered. They reduce the grea...

Laughter is definitely a social expression of emotion rather than a solitary activity. We may occasionally laugh on our own in front of an amusing comedy, but laughter is mostly a social affair. When ...

The pastor R.C. Sproul was studying in the Netherlands in the last 1960s and randomly struck up a conversation with a Dutch woman. The conversation was a common, enjoyable interaction, but when it was...

At issue here is the question: ‘To whom do I belong? To God or to the world?’ Many of my daily preoccupations suggest that I belong more to the world than to God. A little criticism makes me angry, an...

Heavenly Father, we confess that we have too often forgotten that we are Yours. At times, we live our lives as if there was no God and we fall short of being who You created us to be. We have lived fo...

Dear Lord, we come before You today as Your children. We praise You as the God of all creation and the giver of life. You have made us, saved us, and called us to be Your people and to serve in Your K...

O most high, Almighty, good Lord God, to you belong praise, glory, honor, and all blessing. Praised be my Lord God for all his creatures, and especially for our brother the sun, who brings us the day ...

Lord of Hosts, We come before you today in a tone of solemnity. We recognize that while it was Judas who betrayed you for 30 pieces of silver, that we often betray you as well. We know what is right,...

Practicing attention, people can now receive their world as a place of belonging.

Who, then, are we, we prideful late-twentieth-century creatures? Lord knows, we no longer think of ourselves as belonging to anyone or anything. We do not belong – we own; we possess. And that, to say...

Entering a place that is new to us, or seeing a familiar place anew, we move from part to part, simultaneously perceiving individual persons and things and discovering their relationships, so that, wi...