Finding My Place

The other night while riding in my car I heard a song on the radio that immediately transported me back to high school when it came out. Fortunately I can attribute it to the follies of youth that I liked Whitesnake, but the truth is, while listening to the lyrics I remembered why the song resonated so strongly with me back then.

“Here I go again on my own

Walking down the only road I’ve ever known

Like a drifter I was born to walk alone”

That fully defined what my life was like and what I thought of myself at the time, that I would never be truly known and never be loved. Sadly, I believed that that was a good thing. Proudly I claimed the song as my anthem.

For those who know me, this is not surprising because it tied in with the core lie that I believed about myself. For most of my life I believed that I was intrinsically unlovable. God has been healing me of this and delivering me from this over the years. One of the ways that he has done this is through community

Community can mean a lot of things and all of them legitimately. The basic idea, though, is the sense of belonging. I hope to show you how that sense of belonging mattered to God and mattered to my understanding God.

I played football in college. All four years. Three of them, I played little. I was kind of small to be a running back at the college level, even at Division III. That’s the lowest level of NCAA competition brackets. I was determined to play though and put everything I could into being a football player.

I put as little as possible into being part of the team though. I often ate alone rather than joining my teammates. I got in and out of the locker room as quickly as possible. I kept to myself as much as I could during practice and team meetings.

A few people managed to penetrate my defenses and develop some hard won friendships with me, but for the most part I was on the team but not part of it.

Truth is that some of the issue here was personality; I am something of an introvert and extreme extroverts overwhelm me. We had a lot of them on the team. Part of it was that I came from a slightly different culture which made it a little hard for me to transition easily into friendships. All of this, fed the lie and strengthened my role as a loner.

My position coach always found ways for us to be involved in the game and help the team out even if we weren’t on the field. One of his brilliant schemes required us to clean the mud off our teammates’ cleats with a tongue depressor. This proved a valuable service since muddy cleats make you slip and clean cleats give you a distinct advantage in being able to change direction.

However, this was very demeaning. Kneeling down and cleaning off the bottoms of the shoes for twenty five guys really grates the pride. This amplified my sense of not being part of the team. I felt humiliated every muddy game and it seemed to be an especially wet fall that year. So, I did my duty and resented every person whose foot I scraped.

Late that season, we had a game that turned into such a rout in our favor that I actually got into the game. After two plays I trotted off the field. I barely hit the sideline when I was scooped off my feet by two of the starters grabbing me under my arms on both side. They carried me to the bench dropped me on my butt and both knelt down and started scraping my shoes, one on each foot. That instant I realized that I had truly contributed to the team and that they appreciated it.

I also discovered that being served sometimes is more humbling than serving.

It still took me a couple more years to really become part of the team. Most of that revolved around my giving up my judgments against them. One class I took required that we work with a partner. A fellow football player selected me since we were the only two players in the class. It never occurred to me that this would be a good criterion to choose a partner, but for him it was not only the best criteria but the only criteria. I was his teammate and that meant we should be partners. It took me the whole semester to grasp that.

As I worked with him, I discovered that he was a pretty cool guy. We developed a certain intimacy by working together. I learned a lot about him and perhaps some I wished I hadn’t – he was quite vocal about his bodily functions and astoundingly proud of the volume of waste his body could produce. Despite that, he was funny and helpful and challenged me harder than our other classmates and encouraged and cheered me beyond what I expected. For him, that was part of the role of a teammate.

I gradually interacted with other teammates as we had classes together. Sometimes, I helped pull of an occasional prank. I even began eating with them after games. When I went to a concert with a couple of them, driving quite a long way to see a prominent Christian heavy metal band of the day, it surprised me that these guys in the car not only listened to the same music, they watched the same TV shows, and noticed the same girls. They were more like me than I had realized once I let them be part of my life beyond the football field.

Once I decided to embrace the others and started working out with them and hanging out with them, I found that I liked them. Most of them. There were a few that were jerks and I hated being with, but you’re going to get that with any group big enough. Despite that I discovered that people that seemed to have nothing in common with each other can become tight if there is one thing that they do have in common.

I also discovered that when you work with someone, like a teammate, relationships develop similar to those of siblings. For instance, those few jerks that I mentioned before were still my teammates and that made them my jerks. So if you messed with them, you messed with me too.

That’s when I found that you don’t necessarily have to be friends to be teammates and that when you work together you often grow tight with people regardless of friendships. There is something about sweating or bleeding or crying together that binds people together.

This crystallized for me my senior year as we reported to training camp. The coach told us one of our teammates, Steve wouldn’t be joining us that year. Late the last school year he hurt his knee and the issue just aggravated over the summer. He decided to have an operation on his knee but had an allergic reaction to the anesthesia and nearly died. They resuscitated him and repaired his knee later after he recovered. He needed time to rebound from all of that before he could play football again.

This news devastated me. I got angry at God. Why would he do that to Steve in his senior year? I didn’t know him well, but he had been there as long as me and contributed a lot to the team both on and off the field. He was a good guy that I felt deserved better. I was thankful that he was alive but disturbed that he had almost died, trying to grasp these feelings that rose up and the questions of what if he had.

Suddenly, I realized these people mattered to me. I wasn’t a loner anymore; I belonged to a team.

This is what Jesus wants from us. People matter to him. All of them. He wants people to matter to us and he wants us to be important to others. Scripture tells us that we are a body, that we all belong.

What God started in my life through my football team, he continued to grow in me in various environments: ministry teams, church small groups, roommates, writing groups, work, film crews, commuting, and street basketball. Some of these friendships are stronger than others, some run much deeper, but they are all people who are important to me. They are people that I go out of my way to be with and help. They are people that I know would help me if I truly needed it. Some, I could even show up at there door unannounced and ask to stay the night and they would take me in.

So how do these happen? Get together with people and be brave about sharing yourself. Don’t be reckless; some things are better reserved for counseling or for more intimate friendships. But getting to intimate friendships entails being honest about ourselves and that requires courage.

The mistake we often make in this is approaching small groups as ministry and not as relationships. We are so concerned about doing the proper church thing that we miss the chance to get to know people or bond with those around us. This often bleeds into conversations with nonbelievers. Sometimes we focus on evangelizing and forget that the person is a person. Sometimes concern for their children brings them closer to God than well reasoned apologetics.

Currently we have several opportunities for people to participate in groups and find community in our church. I encourage you to seek out the option that best fits your gifts, calling, needs and schedule and then get plugged in. Take advantage of the chance to become rooted in the church and become friends with your fellow believers.

Don’t forget those places outside the church where you can find community as well, through friends and family. The point is to get involved in the lives of the people around you. Invest in others and let them invest in you. Then stand back and watch God reap a harvest in your life that will match the final scene from “It’s a Wonderful Life”; when we have friends, deep friendships, we are truly rich. Despite what Whitesnake convinced me of years ago, we are not meant to walk alone.

Brad Bellmore is a writer of various media and is regular contributor to Christian online magazines.
He lives in Woodstock with his wife and 2 daughters and attends Vineyard Christian Church in Crystal Lake.