Belonging Without The Small Talk

Twenty minutes in and she is running on something that is not energy.

She has done the arriving. She has done the four separate hellos, and the bit where somebody says her name and she has to produce a face. She has answered how are you three times and given a different answer each time, and she has noticed herself doing that, and has decided she does not have the capacity to work out why.

The hall has a hard ceiling. That is a thing she knows about herself now, at thirty one, that she did not know at twenty: that a hard ceiling in a room with sixty people in it does something to sound that means she will pay for this until about lunchtime tomorrow.

There is a woman talking to her about a holiday. It is a nice conversation. She is not being trapped, she is being included, and the woman is kind and there is nothing wrong with any of it.

And she is standing there working out, actively, with a part of her brain she needs for other things, how long she has to stay before leaving is acceptable.

She goes at eleven forty. She says something about a thing she has to do.

In the car she does the thing she always does, which is to run the maths of the morning, and the maths comes out the same way it has come out for about nine years: everybody else can do this and I cannot, and the part of church where people actually become each other's people is the part I always have to leave.

She is not sad about it in the car. She is briskly, efficiently certain that she is a lesser member of that congregation, and that this is simply a fact about her, like her height.

The parts that seem feebler are necessary

Sit down in the car a minute before you drive off, because there is a sentence in the written word that is doing exactly the arithmetic you were doing and getting the opposite answer, and the Holy Spirit put it there for people who leave at eleven forty.

Paul is describing a body. Hands, eyes, feet, ears, and the running argument about which parts matter, and then he says this.

Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary.1 Corinthians 12:22

Which seem to be. He is being careful. He is not saying some parts are weak; he is saying some parts look that way from outside, and then he calls those exact parts necessary.

Not tolerated. Not accommodated. Necessary, which is a word about the body not working without them.

Hear this in the car park. You are not a lesser member of anything, and the written word is what settles it, not encouragement. Scripture says the parts that appear feebler are the necessary ones, and the Holy Spirit is the one who assigned the parts, and He did not put you in that congregation as an accommodation.

Now let me take apart the maths you did on the way to the car, because the sum is right and the assumption underneath it is wrong.

You assumed that belonging happens in the twenty minutes after the service, in a hall with a hard ceiling, over small talk. That is where you cannot go, and therefore you concluded that you cannot belong.

But look at who decided that was the room. Nobody decided it. It is not in the written word anywhere. It is a modern arrangement of tea and standing up, and it suits a particular kind of nervous system extremely well and another kind not at all, and it has quietly become the exam.

Hear this too, and let it end nine years of a verdict. You are not failing at fellowship, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts the necessary parts in the places nobody is looking, and the Spirit of God has never once measured belonging in minutes survived at a tea urn.

And now the good part, which is not a coping strategy but an actual reordering of what you have been told.

Belonging in the New Testament is almost never chat. It is bearing burdens. It is a meal. It is somebody knowing your name and praying it. It is turning up. It is a job done quietly and repeatedly by somebody the room does not particularly notice.

Every one of those is available to you, and several of them are things you are unusually good at, and not one of them requires a hard ceiling and a holiday conversation.

The written word is describing a body where the necessary parts are the ones out of sight, and the Holy Spirit built you for one of those, and you have spent nine years grading yourself against an organ you were never given.