Fitting In When You Just Want To Belong

A friend and I were talking the other day and she said something that made me tear up. I don't remember the exact words, but it was along the lines of this:

"We try to fit in when all we really want is to belong."

Okay...so why the tears?



I look back at the 6ish years I was the worship leader at church. The longer I was in the position, the more people knew who I was and the more people I knew. I genuinely liked people (almost everyone) and liked getting to know new people. I tried to fit in with everyone and I tried to help everyone fit in.

Rewind to October of last year, when B & I started attending church again: I spent months trying to fit in again, but I couldn't. I didn't understand why. People still knew who I was and I still knew the people. Something was off. The more I tried to fit in, the more I felt left out.

Fast forward to February of this year: I was serving in Kid's Night, I was attending a small group, I was attending MOPs and I was going to church. I still felt like I was a cog out of place. I felt bitter, sad, angry...even ostracized. I mentioned a lot of this here.

I think it was the last week of February. There was one Sunday left in that month. B & I had a fight that week (which was still common) and of course, it was over music and church. He brought up a point: I was singing in the seats like I was singing from stage.

And it hit me.

I was trying so hard to fit in again...like I was still the worship leader. But I wasn't the worship leader. I was acting like it, singing like it, pretending like things were okay, but they weren't!

That set me thinking, so I tested it out on that last Sunday. I listened more, I tried to sing normally and there it was....he was right.

This is why I felt like something was off.

During this break, I've been able to do a lot of thinking and I feel like I'm starting to come to a conclusion:

I need to be a normal person the way I used to be, before I was on stage. When you would attend church, sing songs you may or may not know, listen to the sermon, see your friends and then you're done. You didn't linger around the stage. You didn't sing like you had been on stage. You didn't act like you were someone important. You were just...you. And you belonged. You felt like you belonged.

That is what I want again. Instead of being the fallen leader, I can just be Cassandra. Heck, there's so many new people at church who don't even know who I am, that should be easier than it was before. I want to belong.

I think this is relevant in a lot of things. Big events in our life change us. They change our course, they change our goals, our opinions, the way we do things, the way we think. We are sometimes in the darkness and sometimes just skirting around it.

We can't be who we used to be. The more we try to force that, the harder it is to accept the truth and let it become our reality. If we were to stop trying to fit in and just let ourselves belong, I think we would see that we are happier being who we are, the way we are, the REAL me.

I tried so hard to fit in, when all I really want is to belong.