ECPA Top Shelf Book Cover Award
Belonging has never come easy to me.
Growing up, there was my mutated national identity to deal with—my not-quite-American, not-quite-Indonesian soul, restless in both countries. Later, when I came out as a celibate gay Christian, I found I didn't fit into the church as easily as I used to. I've often wondered what it means to belong to others even when I can't manage to blend in with them.
The way Jesus tells it, if we give up on belonging in order to follow him, we'll find ourselves belonging anyway. We might not belong the way other people do, with normal homes and normal families and normal ways of fitting in. But we'll belong in a way that's a hundred times better. We'll be fully in place because we know we are out of place. We'll belong like aliens.
Maybe you're caught in the same tension as me, wanting to fit somewhere even as you're permanently out of place. Maybe you feel like an alien.
If so, let's be aliens together.
Mục lục
Foreword by Jen Pollock Michel
Tentacles: An Introduction
Part One: Belonging In
1. Womb Nostalgia
2. Home Sweet Airport
3. Poohsticks in an Open Sewer
4. The Man Who Coughed Blood on Me
5. Hide and Seek
6. Dengue Days
7. How to Deal Drugs
Interlude: A Glorious Dark
Part Two: Belonging With
8. A Jedi’s Training
9. Santai Sundays
10. Friendship Costs Twenty-Five Dollars an Hour
11. The Origami Artists
12. Laundering
13. Ghosts of Friendship Past
14. Thank You for Making Me Hurt
Interlude: Stitching
Part Three: Belonging To
15. Magnets
16. That Guy Who Cleaned My Microwave
17. The Art of Neighboring
18. Table for One
19. Limbs
20. Memento Mori
21. Rivers Cannot Sweep It Away
Postlude: Shore
Acknowledgments
Giới thiệu về tác giả
Jen Pollock Michel is the author of Teach Us to Want and Keeping Place, both published by Inter Varsity Press with video curriculum available from Right Now Media. She is a regular contributor for Christianity Today and Moody Bible Institute's Today in the Word. A wife and mother of five, Jen lives in Toronto, Canada.