Resting in Belonging

As many of you know, I recently adopted my dog Toby from a rescue organization – he’s since become Redeemer’s unofficial mascot. He’s about ten months old now and honestly, I don’t know much about his early story. I know he came from a high-kill shelter in Georgia along with a sibling, but beyond that, his history is mostly a mystery. What I do know is that when I first brought him home, he carried a significant amount of anxiety.

I tried crate training him, and he panicked. If I left him in the bathroom, he’d destroy things and pull down the shower curtain. I tried putting a gate across the kitchen entrance, and he simply jumped over it. It became obvious pretty quickly that Toby was deeply afraid of being left behind, abandoned, or trapped. And when you think about it, that makes perfect sense. Whatever his earlier life had been, he had learned not to trust permanence. He had learned instability. He had learned uncertainty.

But something slowly began to change. As he learned the rhythms of his new home, as he learned to go outside, as he and I realized he could be trusted loose in the house, he started settling down.

But even more than that, I think what changed him was simply being loved consistently.

Every day I would tell him, “You’re such a good boy.” “I’m proud of you.” “I’m so happy I chose you.” “You’re home now.” And over time, you could literally see his body relax. He stopped panicking. He stopped trying to escape. He started resting peacefully. Why? Because somewhere along the way, Toby began to trust that he belonged. He began to trust that this really was his forever home. He began to trust my love. And I think, in many ways, that is exactly the journey Jesus is inviting us into.

The disciples in today’s reading from Acts are still anxious about outcomes. They ask Jesus, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” They’re still imagining earthly power, political victory, visible success. They want certainty. They want control. They want to know how the future is going to unfold. But Jesus gently redirects them away from all of that. “It is not for you to know the times or periods.”

In other words, stop obsessing over control. Stop trying to possess the future. Stop building your life around earthly power and outcomes. Instead, trust the deeper reality of God’s presence moving within you and among you.

Again and again, the disciples struggled with this. They argued over who would sit at Jesus’ right hand. They wanted importance, status, recognition. But Jesus keeps leading them somewhere entirely different — toward humility, toward trust, toward participation in divine life itself.

That’s why the words from 1 Peter are so important today: “Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God.” Humility in the gospel is not thinking poorly of yourself – it’s thinking rightly of yourself. It’s letting go of the illusion that we are the center of the universe. It’s releasing our desperate need to control everything.

And then Peter says something deeply compassionate: “Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.” What a beautiful line that is. Because scripture recognizes something true about being human: we carry anxiety. We carry fear. We carry uncertainty about the future.

Faith does not mean pretending we don’t feel those things. Faith means we don’t have to carry them alone. We can release them into the larger life of God.

Richard Rohr often says that God’s world is a win-win world, not a win-lose world. That’s so different from the world most of us were trained to inhabit. Our culture teaches scarcity and competition. Somebody has to lose for somebody else to win. Somebody has to be excluded. Somebody has to fail.

But the kingdom Jesus reveals operates differently. Love multiplies itself. Grace multiplies itself. Mercy multiplies itself. God is always opening life wider, not narrowing it down. And that brings us to this profound prayer in John’s gospel. Jesus says, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”

Most of us were taught to think of eternal life as something that begins after death. But Jesus speaks about it in the present tense.

Eternal life is participation in the life of God now. It is awakening now to the divine presence flowing through every moment.

God is not merely a God of the past, nor only drawing us toward some distant future. God is the great “I AM.” The living presence meeting us here and now.

So often we become trapped between regret about the past and anxiety about the future. But God is always arriving in the present moment, offering fresh grace, fresh possibilities, fresh life. And when we cling too tightly to how things used to be, or obsess over how things must turn out, we can actually block ourselves from receiving the grace that is trying to meet us right here.

That’s why Jesus says, “All mine are yours, and yours are mine.” There is belonging at the center of reality. Our identity is not ultimately rooted in success or failure, politics or status, wealth or achievement, even religious performance. Our deepest identity comes from the Source of life itself. As Paul says elsewhere, “In him we live and move and have our being.”

We belong to God before we accomplish anything. Before we prove anything. Before we fix ourselves. Before we realize that we can’t fix ourselves.

And maybe that’s why the hymn we’re about to sing touches people so deeply. “Do not be afraid, I am with you. I have called you each by name.” That is the gospel. Not fear, but presence. Not striving, but belonging. Not abandonment, but love.

I think about Toby sometimes now when he’s stretched out asleep on the couch without a care in the world. The same dog that once panicked if I stepped out of sight now rests peacefully because he finally trusts that he is safe, that he is loved, that he belongs. And I wonder if the spiritual journey is something like that for us too.

So many of us spend our lives spiritually anxious. We fear abandonment. We fear rejection. We fear we are not enough. We try to secure ourselves through achievement or certainty or control. And all the while, underneath all the noise and striving, the voice of Christ keeps whispering to us:

“Do not be afraid. I am with you. I have called you by name.” “You are mine.”

And when we finally begin to trust that — really trust it — something inside us begins to relax. We stop fighting life so hard. We stop trying to control everything. We begin to rest in grace.

And perhaps that is what eternal life truly is: living in the deep trust that beneath everything else, we are already held in the love of God.