Seen and Worthy

“Remember, the deepest desire of the human heart is to belong… to be welcomed… to know that you are seen and worthy.”

Rachel Macy Stafford

I spent some of the best years of my life in a tenth grade class, trying to teach tenth graders to fall in love with not only God but the scriptures that teach us about his story. In each class there were the cool kids, the not-so-cool kids and the kids who defied a label. I loved them all to pieces. They taught me an amazing lesson that I’ve never forgotten. The “labels” that the rest of the community put on them never seemed to translate into lived experience. The cool kids whispered to me of their loneliness with the same frequency as the kids who actually LOOKED lonely. And they were lonely too. All of them - lonely. All of them - swore they did not fit in and no one loved them.

I learned from these confessions. I learned that it does not matter how much you are welcomed, or who invites you to belong - if you cannot accept the truth that you are seen and worthy, there is not enough belonging and welcoming in the world that will make it feel true.

Yes, the deepest desire of the human heart is to belong and be welcomed and to know that we are seen and worthy. BUT THIS IS AN INSIDE JOB. No one can “give” us this, we have to accept it. We must accept our inherent worthiness and then we must live into it.

This acceptance will be hard fought and will necessarily require that we beat back our insecurities and our perceived victimhood. It will feel unnatural. Unless I had the most amazing run of years of having uniquely lonely kids in my class, which I do not think is possible, this acceptance and belonging that we long for is not something we just take to like a duck to water when it presents itself.

Instead of asking the world to prove to us our worthiness, what if we began today, right now, with a commitment to the belief that we (and everyone else) are inherently worthy? We do belong. We are welcome. Sometimes we have to believe it before there is evidence to support our audacious belief. But the belief aligns with the story of God and I like our odds that it will ultimately prove true.

In December 1954 a committee that the state of North Carolina should find the way to meet the requirements of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation on the basis of race was unconstitutional. By the late summer of 1957 ONLY a dozen children of color were enrolled in traditionally white schools. In 1961 the number had increased to 200 children in 11 districts. It was a slow start, but the ball was rolling. I want to know how those dozen children felt. I want to know what it was like for the first 200 to blaze a trail. Most of all, I hope they knew that they were inherently worthy. For those kids and for us, even those of us who have never had to experience that kind of exclusion - we all struggle to feel worthy. How can we make this a little easier for one another?

New Blog Features

We know that most of you read the blog in your email inbox.  That's great.  It's quick and easy.  But we also want to make you aware of some new features starting in December that you'll only be able to use if you view the blog on our website.  In short, all posts from December 1, 2017 on will be grouped to make it easier to find past content.  

We will be using "tags" so you can quickly find posts that may be on the same topic but written at different points in time.  For instance, if the tag "codependency" shows up at the bottom of a post (on the website) you can click on that tag and see all the posts we've ever written on codependency.  

You can also:  

• Find posts based on month and year of creation
• Find posts based on the author (view all posts an author has ever written)

Bear in mind these features will only apply to posts moving forward and will not apply to the archived posts from our prior blog host and, because of that, it will take a little bit of time before they become really useful.  Even so, we want you to know what's on the horizon and let you know there will be benefits to getting out of your email and onto the website.  

Welcome to our new blog

Hey NSC'ers,

Welcome to our new blog format.  

Starting Dec. 1, 2017, we will post our daily blog directly on our Squarespace website and they will be emailed to you via our new MailChimp account.  Between now and then you will continue to receive the blogs in the exact same format you are used to.  There will only be one more day where you will receive both an "old" blog email and a "new" blog email.

We are doing this so we can have greater control over the format and layout of each post and how they appear both in your browser, on your phone, and in your email app.  Hopefully this will make it easier to read and engage our posts.  In a few days, you'll get another email unpacking new features that make the blog more searchable.

If you're having problems viewing our posts in any of these places, please let me (Scott:  scott@northstarcommunity.com) know so I can get to work on ironing out all the wrinkles.  

Thanks!