Randy comes to our young adult ministry every week. He has a speech impediment and usually stands in the corner by himself. When I go to greet him and tell him how glad I am to see him, he says the same thing to me every week. “I almost didn’t come tonight, and I don’t think I’ll be coming back.” “Why is that?” I ask him. “Because nobody likes me here. People don’t talk with me. I don’t think I belong here.” I assure Randy that he does belong and that I’ve seen people coming up to him to chat. And although he always refutes my encouragement and says that he doesn’t feel like he belongs, Randy always comes back. I’m beginning to see a pattern. Randy desperately wants to connect, to fit in, but he doesn’t feel like he does. It isn’t that people aren’t reaching out to him- they are. But he really believes that he’s disliked and doesn’t belong. So I decided to ask him to lunch to really get to know him. As we talked he kept bringing to my attention that every time he walked into the church he felt as if a dart pierced him in the heart. “Why do you feel that way?” I asked him. “Because people don’t like me,” he said with a lump in his voice. Man, I thought, this guy is in pain. And as much as I tried to logically explain to him that I’d clearly seen people reaching out to him, and giving him their phone numbers, no amount of convincing seemed to work. But I could tell that Randy desperately wanted a place to belong, a place where he could be loved. Finally I asked, “What was it like for you growing up?” Randy gave me some basic information about his parents, his brother, and his days in high school. So I probed a little deeper, “Did you have a lot of friends when you were growing up- were you well-liked?” He looked at me with sad and despairing eyes and said, “No I wasn’t. The kids in my neighborhood were awful.” He went on to tell me that the kids had made fun of him relentlessly: about his speech impediment, his last name, and so on. After asking him more questions, I began to see how his past (being made fun of and disliked) was so embedded in his memory and experience, that it caused him to believe the same was true in the present. Though nobody at church was making fun of him or
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