My coaching client sat staring out my large living room windows, silent tears slipping down her face.

“For over 20 years I knew where I belonged, what my work and identity involved. I had a team who knew me and shared my vision for building relationships with our Chinese neighbors and students at the English Center I supervised. Now, I feel lost. I am back in the American house and city I grew up in, caring for my aging mother. No one here really knows me as an adult, an independent woman, an overseas worker, or understands the life I have left.”

This transition was tough. My client’s mother was developing dementia quickly and other offspring lived with their families in another city. 

In a day of worldwide upheaval, war, famine, and genocide scattering people from their origins to places unknown, how do we calculate belonging? Combine that with rampant confusion over gender and sexual identities, workplace reorganization and jobs that don’t require leaving your bedroom, and well, how do we know what labels to put on an application or answer conversational questions about who we are? 

Followers of Christ have more than these temporary connections of places, careers, or even people to define us. We have a relationship with the One who made us, purchased us from the grip of flesh and sin, and seeks eternal, permanent connection. He chose us to belong to Him, forever.

Months later I saw my client with a small group at a city-wide women’s event and we smiled to one another. She confided at a break that she had pressed into her decades of faith in Christ, spending many hours in prayer, study, tears, and solo worship in her childhood bedroom. “I am finding contentment, slowly, a new definition of belonging, embracing who I am to my Savior first.” 

Where we’ve been, what we’ve done, our qualifications and accomplishments do not matter and do not change the constant connection Jesus offers us. In choosing to belong to Him, we are known and loved fully. Our longings to belong are fulfilled.