The gift of belonging

You will never really enjoy other people, you will never have stable emotions, you will never lead a life of godly contentment, you will never conquer jealousy and love others as you should until you thank God for making you the way He did.
~Hufstetler in Calm My Anxious Heart by Dillow

The Hufstetler quote paints a very stark picture. It boils down to this: You can't live with others until you can live with yourself.

This quote comes from the 3rd chapter of Calm My Anxious Heart  which focuses on Psalm 139. A psalm prompts us to embrace the intentions of our Creator. In Genesis 1, the creation story, God looks at what he has made and he says, "That's good." In response this writer cries out in agreement, "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made." He highlights the loving attention God lavishes on you and I from our bodies, to our thoughts, to our feelings, even to our habits. Despite having memorized this whole chapter in 7th grade, I later still struggled to thank God for making me the way He did. In fact, I wondered if he had been asleep the day I was born.

I was born to Chinese parents in the American South. I stood out; in school, in the stores, on our street. Nevertheless, all my closest friends in childhood were also Chinese. My friends' moms and dads were my "aunties" and "uncles". I merrily lived in this happy bubble of Chinese-American life until my teen years.

In the midst of my teen angst about seemingly everything, I remember thinking, "I wish I were Chinese born in China or American (White) born in America." The constant feeling of not fitting in because I didn't understand homecoming and Friday nights out and the Breakfast Club and sleepovers crescendo-ed into an inability to accept that I was not some cosmic mistake. God must have been asleep that day and gotten confused. A Wong Yuen-Ling should be born in China. And an Andrea White should be born in America. But Andrea Wong? What is that other than a mistake?

At 18 or 19, I finally noticed Ephesians 2:19, and it reorganized my inner sense of geography. I'd remembered the beginning of the chapter where Paul lays out the state of humanity: In sin, we were dead. But God, in his loving mercy rescues us in our utter helplessness through Jesus. This rescue is so complete that not only does life overcome death, but that old division between Jews and not-Jews is obliterated. Now here comes verse 19: "Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household..."

Paul was speaking to his friends in the city of Ephesus about their identity, but I needed to hear this about my own identity. All I could see what my own strangeness and alienation, the many ways I didn't fit in. I needed to know that whatever I felt about my status as a person in my community, as a person who belonged or not, in Christ I had new citizenship, new household membership. In Christ, I belonged.

Calm My Anxious Heart makes the point that if we knew how purposefully and lovingly God created us, we could give up some of the hang ups (or dare I say it, self-hate) we have about ourselves. That strikes me as right, but in my own life, the reality of belonging to God's kingdom through Jesus regardless of my own true and perceived traits has been the key to following the second half of the second greatest commandment: "Love your neighbor as yourself."