Jon’s Story, Part 1: Homesick to Belong

I’ve never felt like I belong. It’s a feeling, I think, many of us know. It reaches across all of us, reaching far, leaving its mark on significant moments. When you were first rejected at school, first made fun of. When you felt separated from a parent’s love, or became separated from them physically. When that friendship or relationship failed, feeling like you would never stop falling, falling. When you couldn’t get that job, that promotion, the right person to notice you at the right time and see your value and worth. 

I’ve carried that feeling with me all my life. And in my effort to close the gap, I’ve overcompensated. From dressing differently from my counterparts, to listening to different music, to squeezing as many different hairstyles into one year I could. Some of that–marching to the beat of my own drum–is as inseparable from me as my brown eyes. But unlike taking things in with my eyes, I’ve longed to be the one taken in. 

The faith of my youth was heavy-handed on leaving this world behind where we’d all rendezvous in the sky, the sweet by-and-by, and feast on the heavenly pie. Sure that I wouldn’t make it but terrified of the alternative, I said what I needed to say. It would be years before I understood fear as the driving motivation. 

Late high school would change things. A new assignment from the military for my dad’s position took us from Europe to South Carolina, a state I had never heard of. The mythology of culture shock vanished, and not only was the local cuisine different, church was too. Church was no longer made up of GIs and their families, all their denominational backgrounds set aside for the sake of a new community; church was made up of crowds, subscribing to the beliefs of the church they were attending. The youth ministry was a smaller version of what took place in the main sanctuary–a full, student-led band, production lights, and a sermon filled with the right mix of humor, illustration, and biblical teaching. Church was now “cool,” and I bought in. 

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t dragged to church–I wanted to go. The pretty girls helped, but so did my peers who took their faith seriously, the leadership who spent one-on-one time with me, and the ways I was encouraged to be a leader to students around me. It came time to begin applying to colleges, but since my hate for school ran about as deep as my inability to do algebra I decided it wasn’t for me. As these kinds of things usually happen, I learned at that time that Christian colleges existed–places where I could sit in a classroom and learn about God and the Bible–places where I could explore my faith deeper rather than explore the root of some number. The timing of this new awareness with what had been percolating in me felt far from coincidental. My next step was obvious. 

In the autumn I began attending a small Christian college in the Midwest. It didn’t take longer than my first weekend there to feel like I didn’t fit in. Some people had gone to high school together, or the same church, or were from neighboring towns or states. I was from nowhere and knew no one. I was lonely. And within a couple months, I was homesick. But not just for my family and friends; I was homesick for belonging.

If I knew what it was, or why it was, maybe I’d know more in the future when this feeling inevitably struck again. Maybe it was because I was a geographical outsider or I dressed differently or I hadn’t read the same books. Maybe I was looking for something else and it was obvious to everyone but me. 

Eventually I made some friends who either dropped out within a couple months of our meeting or stopped going to their classes out of disillusionment or depression. By the end of my first semester, I had failed two classes. This wasn’t working, and by the second semester I was planning my exit strategy.

My plan was simple: Leave school and join friends from South Carolina who were planting a church in another state. It would still be ministry and I would belong, I reasoned. The thought of taking my life in this new direction totally engrossed me. 

Unfortunately, my parents shared neither my vision nor my optimism for this plan. Being the first person in my family to leave home for college, they didn’t want me to give up on this opportunity. They were afraid that what I was viewing as a “break” would be indefinite. I was ready to dig my heels in when another event changed the trajectory of my college experience, and my life.

A friend of a friend knew where I was going to school and a little bit about what I was going through. She got my number and called me out of the blue one evening, strongly recommending I connect with an old friend of hers, Ryan Seibert. “He’s in the grad school there,” she told me. “You’ll love him.” This was a red flag. If it was difficult connecting with people in the undergrad, I couldn’t imagine how much harder it would be with someone in the grad school. I told her thanks for looking out and that I’d reach out to him. I didn’t. We did this dance a couple more times until my phone went off in my pocket during class one afternoon. I didn’t recognize the number, but my gut told me it was this grad student calling me. There was a voicemail. 

Darting for the door after class, I took the stairs down and began listening to the voicemail. Immediately I was in disbelief. The voice in the receiver was jubilant, and the desire I felt to have time spent with me in that one voicemail was more than I’d felt all year long.