The Power Of BelongingSample

This reading plan is a guide to enable you to uncover what we believe is already yours—the power of belonging. And yet this is not a simple journey: that dirty sheet is the shame that hides the most precious and powerful leadership message we will ever know. The basement is often bolted and locked, lest anyone else realize that we are not as wonderful as we would like them to believe. Our stories seem to point in the opposite direction—away from vulnerability and towards learned strength—and so we need to face reality before we find revelation. It is a struggle, but to uncover the reality of your belonging is to be transformed not just in your leadership, but in your life.

Leaders who ‘almost belong’ are usually doing great things, but they still carry a sense that this is an incomplete or inferior version of their ‘real’ calling. They have enough good things going on that they don’t want to ‘rock the boat’ and they feel that they should be satisfied, and yet there is this longing for something greater. 

Before Moses spent forty years shepherding the Israelite nation through the wilderness to the Promised Land, he shepherded the sheep of Midian in the desert for forty years. It was here that God met him in the burning bush and called him to change direction, returning to his original home in Egypt. It wasn’t that he was apparently unhappy as a shepherd; it was that he was tending the wrong flock. 

Moses’ journey from shepherd of sheep to shepherd of people was the journey from un-belonging to belonging. It was the realization of a true vision of ‘home’ in which all of his insecurities and doubts were recalibrated. God hasn’t called us to ‘almost belong’. He has called us to ‘radically belong’; to lead in the confidence of knowing that we are His sons and daughters. 

The theology of radical belonging is the discipline of knowing that you belong to God and therefore you belong in His world. The calling to love your neighbor is second only to loving God Himself. The only good neighbors are the ones who know that they belong—they belong despite all of the difference they see between those whom they live alongside.