by Aaron Foster | Pastor
The first week of February marks six months in Houston for my family and me. When we arrived, everything was new. New home. New church. New job. New school. New neighborhood. New rhythms. New faces. New understanding of heat. The newness, on one hand, brought tremendous excitement and opportunity. On the other, it brought discomfort and displacement as we experienced – in many ways for the first time – what it was like to not be known.
But six quick months later the discomfort and displacement has mostly faded as we’ve been embraced by our family, the City Church community, and our neighborhood. Cara and I find ourselves feeling shocked and humbled by how quickly we have felt settled amid the newness because of the warmth and love of the circles in which we’ve found ourselves.
We realized that while Houston was a major change for us as newcomers, newcomers are not new for Houston. Baked into the ever-evolving strands of Houston’s DNA is a transience that makes change a well-worn path for the city. So many of the people we’ve met have their own stories of making a move (or two) to Houston that it’s often difficult to find a circle where everyone is a native Houstonian. As a result, the people of Houston have learned how to truly welcome and extend hospitality to a newcomer because in many cases, they themselves were once new.
But even with Houston’s heart for hospitality, there are people in our neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, and church who feel the aches of newness daily in those circles – even if the calendar would no longer call them new. You yourself may even resonate with the discomfort of not being fully welcomed or known in this season of your life.
City Church has an exciting opportunity ahead to be, even more, a community in which people who feel unknown or new experience welcome, belonging, and a deep sense of being known – each of those qualities reflecting that which we have in Jesus Christ. We can be this community together by taking a further step in giving ourselves back to the community, moving toward the example of the deep commitment that those in the first century had to the early church.
If you’re wondering what that next step might look like for you in this season ahead, or you’ve been experiencing some of the heart-ache of a wrestling with belonging, please reach out to me (aaron@citychurch.org) or one of our other pastoral staff, and we would love to come alongside you.
I have witnessed the power that a loving community can have in just six months, and I am so excited for how God will use City Church in the next six months to provide a deeper level of belonging to each of us and newcomers alike.