belonging on Alienation

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...

Brothers and sisters, you are no longer strangers to God, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ ...

From a purely biological point of view man is not at home anywhere in the world.

Aloneness can lead to loneliness. God's preventative for loneliness is intimacy - meaningful, open, sharing relationships with one another. In Christ we have the capacity for the fulfilling sense ...

A therapist once told me that the most common complaint he heard from his patients was the feeling that they didn’t belong. The feeling of being an imposter, or of being outside things, of not fitting...

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

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

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...

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.

[Belonging is] the innate human desire to be part of something larger than us. Because this yearning is so primal, we often try to acquire it by fitting in and by seeking approval, which are not only ...

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

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...

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 ...

I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.

Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.

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...

We long to see our lives whole, to know that they matter. We wonder whether our many activities might ever come together in a way of life that is good for ourselves and others. Lacking a vision of a l...

When I engaged with twenty-somethings, for example, who were just entering the adult years, I found them preoccupied with clarifying their identity. What kind of a man or woman am I becoming, they w...

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...

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

Recently I’ve wondered about the connection between the English words “longing” and “belonging”. Isn’t belonging one of our greatest longings in life? Don’t we all have some deep, inner desire t...

I think it is interesting that God designed people to need other people. We see those cigarette advertisements with the rugged cowboy riding around alone on a horse, and we think that is strength, whe...

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.

Have you ever noticed how closely the words longing and belonging are connected? I’m not sure of their exact etymology, but I do believe that our deepest longing in life is to be-...

Ever console or scold people hurt in human relationships that satisfaction comes from God alone? Stop. Adam's fellowship with God was perfect, and God Himself declared Adam needed other humans.

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

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...

There is a story of a public sinner who was excommunicated and forbidden from entering the church, He took his woes to God. "They won't let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner." "W...

Lamin Sanneh, the African theologian who would be pivotal in the development of missional theology, was raised in an orthodox Muslim household in Gambia. He found himself drawn to Christianity after e...