Is there any hope for the fractured world in which we live? Is there any answer to the increasing loneliness and isolation people are feeling?

Nearly 1600 years have passed since Patrick walked these lands. Ireland was riven with division then also. Patrick too knew loneliness and isolation when he was first brought here, trafficked as a slave.

We can imagine his sense of dislocation: wrenched from family and land, all connections to home brutally severed—and for this to last for years?

But surprisingly, after escaping and returning to his own family, Patrick came back to these shores to be among these people. Something had happened to transform his sense of isolation and his view of the people he was amongst. He had found the secret of belonging.

In the loneliness of the rain-sodden fields he found a belonging deeper than he had imagined: “So I turned with all my heart to the Lord my God… He protected me and consoled me
as a father does for his son.”

What a rich description of belonging: “as a father does for his son”

The solution then is the solution now. We were made to know God and to belong to him. This is the belonging that lies deep below all our other longings to belong. Our deepest yearnings for belonging find their rest in him. To know him, and to know that he deeply delights in us, that no matter what has happened or will happen we belong to him, equips us to face everything else.

You can belong to God. We are born naturally separated from God, but like Patrick we can turn back to this God and find that deep acceptance and belonging through Jesus Christ.

When we belong to God, we find ourselves part of a new community of people—a people gathered from different backgrounds, cultures and stories— those who have experienced the transforming power of the Good News of Jesus Christ. It not only transforms us individually, it makes us members of God’s family—brothers and sisters in Christ. That’s what Patrick began to see unfolding here.

God’s new community is to be an outpost of heaven—a place where the brokeness of the world is healed, and a place of belonging for all who come to Christ from every background, culture and story.

In a world of loneliness, here is a place you can belong. Here are people who are called by God to bear one another’s burdens, to love one another, to welcome one another, to pray for one another.

Patrick’s delight was
“the many thousands of my brothers and sisters” and through trusting in Christ you can belong to that family too.