belonging on Self-Centeredness

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...

Lord God, You have called us to yourself and made us into a people. We belong to you, and we belong to one another. But in our self-focused lives, we have forgotten that. We have lived for ourselves. ...

The apostle Paul said, “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on thin...

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...

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...

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...

[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 ...

Have you ever been guilty of being a “conversational topper”?  The topper is someone who, when another confides a challenge or shares an exciting event, immediately connects that event to their own li...

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...

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...

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

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.

Belonging can be such a fickle and painful process in life. As the popular researcher and writer Brené Brown describes in her book, Braving the Wilderness, she struggled to fit in after moving to New ...

Your life is not your own: it belongs to God. To "be yourself" is to be and do what God wants you to be and do, knowing that God created you for a mission and knows you and your mission bett...

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

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 ...

Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are

E.M. Forster, an early 20th-century novelist, remains widely read across the world. Beyond his talent for writing significant books, short stories, and plays, he was renowned for being an exceptional ...

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...

One of the reasons I love a good invitation is that I get tired of being told what to do. As the very responsible oldest daughter of a pastor and someone who entered vocational ministry at a young age...

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...

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...

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-...

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

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

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

We are not our own: therefore, let us not set our own will as our rule, but submit ourselves wholly to God.

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

The vision that Jesus gives us is this: That I am unconditionally loved, that I belong to God, and that I am a person who can really trust that. When I meet another person who also is rooted in the he...

Verb two: God chose. “Just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love” (Eph.1:4) Everybody I have ever become acquainted with has a story,...