When I was growing up as a preacher’s daughter, then missionary daughter, we went to church 3 or 4 times per week.
It was our life. It was our purpose. It was our calling.
But it was Sunday nights that meant the most to me.
These long evenings, after the final church service of the day, were magical to me. When we were in Indiana at church, we would pile into my grandma’s dining room and eat crackers with cheddar cheese. Sometimes, pimento cheese. If there was a guest preacher, we would adjourn to the back porch. Crickets chirped all around us. Humidity made my skirt cling to my legs. But, sitting on the wicker furniture, listening to the buzz of conversation around me, feasting on fatty cheese, salty crackers, and creamy pies, I belonged.
When we lived overseas, Sunday nights prolonged the connections I craved. Those nights were grand. My mom would invite families to our house over for sandwiches. Cars would cram into our narrow driveway. And then out came the cold cuts, chips, iced tea, cookies. I wasn’t sure what was better: church itself or what happened after church.
When I was a teenager, we connected with more Americans in Germany. Sunday nights then often included dinner out at a restaurant or ice cream along the main street in Herzogenaurach. We would go to this place that served ice cream molded to look like spaghetti. Vanilla ice cream, strawberry sauce, and a dusting of white chocolate powder. Sometimes, my friend Leslie and I would talk our families into going to McDonald’s or Burger King. We would chow down on chicken sandwiches and laugh about something stupid and sing Disney songs (which I wasn’t supposed to know as the prim and proper preacher’s kid).
Church, food, talking, community.
The sense of camaraderie and fellowship were invaluable to me, shaping my identity and my sense of self, well into my young adulthood.
When I moved out from my parents’ home and forged my own path in life, I longed for the feeling of belonging that church gave me. It was difficult to find in the big city where I’d found myself as I worked in a busy retail environment where everyone wore the same color shirt and the breakroom smelled like old lunchmeat. Suddenly, I was both alone and lonely for the first time in my life.
It was during these hard years that depression first crept into my heart, mind, and soul. My journals became filled with entries of sadness, despair, and loneliness. I started to believe that maybe life wasn’t worth living. After all, who would miss me?
One afternoon, alone on my couch, I wrote this:
“The prospect of death has weighed on my mind for at least a year, if not longer. Like falling off a mountain. Going on a hike and never returning. Falling down stairs. I run from these thoughts, yet here they are, carved in black and white, for all to see.
What I feel doesn’t make sense anyway and I can’t ask constant help from anyone.
What is the great ache inside, that appears for a moment
Then vanishes?
What is this feeling – like I’m awash with the troubles of time.
It knocks me over, hurts my stomach, – I cover the feeling.
So sad and dark, my eyes shed their tears as I’m alone.”
I know, dark.
The problem was that while I felt alone, I actually wasn’t alone. Over the next decade of life, God consistently put people into my life who showed me the way back to the sense of belonging I’d felt in my younger days overseas. My college group. My co-workers. My roommates. Volunteer opportunities. A local church. The lie of loneliness was slowly replaced with the truth of connection. The lie that I was “too much” for people to handle was replaced with the truth of being held up in the hands of strong friends.
Slowly, I realized that community can be fostered in any space that accepts you without judgment and with love. A space where you can be you in all of your “you-ness”. (How is that for a sentence?)
While the local church should be the model for fostering a sense inclusion and acceptance, I now have other communities around me, bulwarking me with support. My current spaces include:
- My martial arts school where both instructors and fellow students know me on a first name and check on me if I don’t show up to class or to help teach.
- My local bakery where I know the owner and we commiserate on the difficulties of parenting, work/life balance, and the rapidly changing world around me.
- The retirement home where I visit each month with residents, sing songs, and read Scripture with them and learn from their wisdom.
- The kid’s ministry inside my local church where I hang out with little kids while exhausted parents get time to listen to a sermon and worship God. It’s here they’ve nicknamed me, “Mama K”.
- The street where I live that houses friends for my son and a grandmotherly neighbor who bakes us cinnamon rolls. Sometimes, I borrow the shade of my neighbor’s tree while I take a work Zoom call. Or sometimes, the neighborhood kids come to my back yard and jump on the trampoline with my son.
In the cold nights, when my head mocks me and tells me I am alone and messed up, the faces from these communities come to mind. Again and again, I show up, and repeatedly, I am not rejected. Slowly, the truth of belonging and acceptance kicks out the lies of loneliness and isolation.
My Kid’s Ministry Pastor Steve recently said to me,
“Community really just means ‘saying yes’.”
I agree with this idea. It is about saying yes as often as you can. It’s about paying attention to opportunities. Showing up and letting yourself be seen. This may sometimes feel like you are inserting yourself into the situation – or intruding where you don’t belong – but keep trying. It may be that the people around you don’t view it that way. Where you think you are intruding, they welcome your company. Where you think you won’t belong may be the place you stumble upon “your people”.
Community means surrounding yourself with people who love you as you are, yet also bring you out of yourself. They lovingly push you to your goals. They gently nudge you away from self-destruction and towards the life God intended you to have. They speak, they pray, they hug.
Sometimes, this nudging happens over sandwiches on a Sunday night. Other times, the push happens in a Martial arts class as you make yourself do one…more…pushup with your partner. Or, at other moments, your community realizes how hard you’re trying or how sad you are, and someone comes alongside you and sits next to you in the mess of depression, anxiety, and overwhelm.
No words. Just presence.
Not a single human should live life without the loving, open, connected sense of belonging. God designed His children to be bonded to each other. As my pastor Shawn Johnson wrote in his book, Attacking Anxiety,
“The Enemy loves it when we feel isolated…
because then he can convince us to shove down the dark stuff and never tell a soul….
Every single one of us was created to pursue the plans of God with the people of God.”
The people of God are everywhere, not just inside a church building. For me, after leaving my parents’ roof, it just took me a little time to discover my new communities. I’m grateful to have found my spaces, my tribes, my home.
So, as I reflect on those Sunday nights, when I was a kid, maybe it wasn’t the food. Maybe it was how those people made me feel. How they included me. How they loved me. How they said “yes” to me with consistency and with grace over and over again. Their example pushes me forward. It compels me to reach out to anyone I see who isn’t connected to anywhere, and say, “I know some places where you’d fit right in. You’re not a burden. You’re a God-designed gift, so there’s no need to feel lonely anymore..”
As the group, The Highwomen, sing,
“You can hold my hand
When you need to let go
I can be your mountain
When you’re feeling valley-low
I can be your streetlight
Showing you the way home…
I want a house with a crowded table
And a place by the fire for everyone.
The door is always open –
Your picture’s on my wall –
Everyone’s a little broken,
And everyone belongs.”
Yes, come with me. Yes, there’s room for you. Yes, you belong here.
Yes, sandwiches are waiting.
Coffee & Conversation 