The Sunday Letter | Blessed South

I got to spend a little time this week with some people I do not see nearly enough.

We were close once, back when we all lived in the same town. The easy kind of close, where you did not have to make a plan to see one another, you just ran into each other, and that was most of it. Life has scattered us since. Different towns, different states, the ordinary drift that pulls people apart without anybody ever deciding it should. So now our time together comes in short visits, months apart, squeezed in around everything else a life is full of.

And here is the strange, good thing I keep noticing about those visits. The rarer they get, the more they seem to be worth.

You would think distance and time would wear a friendship thin, and sometimes they do. But not the real ones. When you have built something true with somebody, something honest and a little bit vulnerable and worth the trouble it took to build, that connection does not run out when the visits get rare. It just waits. You sit down together after a year apart, and inside of ten minutes it is as though no time passed at all, because the thing you made never actually went anywhere. It went into you. It became part of who you are.

I am more convinced every year that those connections are close to the whole point of the thing. Not the accomplishments. Not the calendar. The handful of people who truly know you, and the ones who let you truly know them back.

Which has me thinking this week about belonging, and about where friendships like that even come from in the first place. Because not one of mine started out as a lifelong friend. Every one of them started as a stranger. Somebody I happened to sit beside. Somebody’s cousin. A face in the same crowd on the same night that I had no idea I would still be calling a friend all these years later.

That is one of the quiet miracles of a place like this, and you can watch it happen any Friday night about now. Go to a small-town game and look at who is in the bleachers. The pharmacist out running the chains, the band parents, three generations under the same lights, and nobody sitting there a stranger for long. Every easy, familiar face in that crowd was a stranger once. And you never know, walking into a night like that, which shoulder you brush is going to turn into the person who stands beside you at a wedding, or a hospital hallway, or a graveside, thirty years down the road. We just do not get told, going in, which encounters are the ones that will last.

Because down here, belonging is not something you apply for. There is no form and no interview. Belonging mostly happens to you, and usually before you have decided whether to let it. Show up at the same church two Sundays running and by the third somebody wants to know where you were. Sit in the same spot at enough games and one Friday night you realize the folks around you would notice your empty stretch of bleacher. You become a regular at the meat-and-three entirely by accident. Nobody votes you in. They just start expecting you, and being expected somewhere is most of what belonging is.

We mostly use the word member for clubs and gyms now, and the word has gone thin from it. A membership is a card in your wallet. But the old meaning of member is a part of a body: a hand, an eye, an arm. To be a member of something, in that older sense, is not to be on its list. It is to be a working part of a living thing, and for the thing to be less than itself when you are missing.

That is the kind of membership September hands out down here, if you let it. Look at what this month does: the games, the suppers, the choir lofts and Sunday school rooms filling back in, the tailgates and homecomings stacking up ahead. From the outside it can look like nothing but a busy calendar. It is not. It is a body putting itself back together after the scattered months of summer, every part finding its place again.

So here is my encouragement for the week, and I am preaching to myself first. Go be a member of something, in the old sense of the word. Not a name on a roll. A working part. Take your seat, bring your dish, sing your part, hold the door. And keep an eye out for the person who has not been pulled in yet, because the difference between them staying a stranger and getting found may be nothing more than somebody deciding to expect them. That stranger, after all, is only ever a friend you have not had for twenty years yet.

Take a minute with that today. Then go take your place.

That’s the week. See you next Sunday.

The South, Shared.

Porch Light

A brief Sunday reflection from Blessed South

There is a kind of person the porch light is really for. Not the family already inside, gathered and warm and accounted for. The one still out. The one driving home late, or walking up the steps unsure of the welcome, or wondering if anybody thought to leave a light on for them at all.

I wrote up above about belonging, about taking your place in the body you have been given. But I know how that word can land on a person who is not feeling it. Maybe you are between churches right now. Maybe you are new in a town that already looks full. Maybe you are sitting in a crowd this very week and feeling, for all of it, like the one person nobody would notice was missing. Belonging is a fine thing to be handed. It is a hard thing to hear about when it seems to be happening to everybody but you.

So this part is for you, and it is the older, deeper belonging, the one that does not wait on a pew or a bleacher seat or an invitation that has not come.

“Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.” — Isaiah 43:1

Called you by name. Not by number. Not by crowd. By name. Before any church ever put your name on a roll, before any town learned to expect you at the same booth on a Friday, this word says God knew it and spoke it and claimed you with it. You are His. That is not a belonging you earn your way into or get voted onto. It was true of you before you walked into any room, and it holds on the nights you walk into none.

I have needed that on my own lonesome stretches, the seasons when the human belonging felt thin and a long way off. What held me through those was not first that some group finally let me in. It was that I was already known, already named, already wanted, by the One who does not keep a waiting list.

So if this is a week you feel on the outside of everything, hear both words at once. Go on and take a place among people, because you are wanted there more than you let yourself believe. But even if you cannot yet, even if this is a season of standing at the edge of the room, know that the truest light was never the porch of a house you are not sure of. It is the one that has been calling you by name your whole life long. It is on tonight, and it is on for you.

And if this brought you something today, share it with someone who’d enjoy it too.