by Sarah E. Westfall
As I moved through elementary school into the upper grades, I wrapped my identity in achievement, and that little girl who gathered the neighborhood became little more than a memory. I collected labels such as “straight-A student,” “class president,” and “softball team captain” like patches sewn on a heavy backpack. Each label became a way to beautify the lack I carried inside like a secret.
I morphed from friend group to friend group like a chameleon, from the cheerleaders to the choir kids, from church youth group to the teens who wore Black Sabbath shirts and smoked out behind the Bob Evans where I worked evenings and weekends. I belonged everywhere and nowhere all at once.
Hiding has a way of creating distance, of keeping ourselves and others at arm’s length. We wrap thick layers of protection across our shoulders, hoping to be something other than human people who hurt and who feel, but in the process we do more than bury the desire for communion. We bury ourselves.
We cover up who we really are, hoping who we appear to be will be welcomed. But belonging and acceptance are not the same.
By the time high school graduation rolled around, I had convinced all of us—maybe even myself—that I had performed my way into belonging. If you had been there, watching me give a class president speech beneath the fluorescent hum of the gymnasium lights, you would not have believed I felt out of place. In my pale blue robes, gold cords draped around my shoulders, I appeared confident and secure. But achievement is an easy anesthetic. Beneath the accolades was a girl who wondered whether she was wanted, not for what she produced or how she presented but for the person underneath it all. I was not a prodigal, and yet, I could not shake the sense of being lost.
The strange thing about being human is that we must hold our smallness and specialness at the same time. Our flesh comes with both limitations and possibility, inherent goodness and a propensity toward sin, and it is often easier to let one win over the other. It is easier to wrap our identity around half truths rather than navigate the nuance. But belonging invites us to bring our whole selves into the room.
Your individuality matters because the Spirit is alive in your specificity, and when all those tiny details come together, the sum of our humanity can become a body alight with Love, a manifestation of Christ himself. God does not ask us to shrink but to expand, to let our identity become a vessel that we offer in love for “the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:7).
Becoming more ourselves is not self-indulgence, but a way to love. A way to see God. A way to hold our complexities alongside one another. Letting go of external pressures and expectations, the love of the Father invites us to stop searching for acceptance with all its demands, all the ways we lose ourselves in an attempt to be seen, and instead step toward a belonging that comes to you and says, “You do not have to try so hard. Come home. You were lost but have been found.”
Adapted from The Way of Belonging by Sarah E. Westfall. ©2024 by Sarah E. Westfall. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
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