Tag Archives: Belonging

Devotional, Series

God Beginnings, Part 12: When One Part Suffers

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Read 1 Corinthians 12:23–27

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.” (Romans 12:15 NLT)

A diverse group of people stands closely connected in a circle. At the center, one person bows his head while another embraces and comforts him. Nearby, others share laughter and joyful embraces, visually expressing how suffering and celebration ripple through a connected community.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “When One Part Suffers” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

Ministry can certainly have its ups and its downs. There have been seasons when I have experienced tremendous joy, moments when I have wondered how I could possibly be blessed enough to do what I do, and others that have hurt more deeply than I expected.

I imagine you could say something similar about your own life.

Over the years, I have experienced what it feels like to be genuinely welcomed. I have walked into communities where people made room for me, trusted me, encouraged me, accepted me for who I am, celebrated with me, and allowed me to become part of their lives. I have also experienced rejection…harsh and hurtful rejection. I know what it feels like when welcome disappears, relationships fracture, or you discover that a place where you thought you belonged no longer feels like home.

But here is something I have learned from both experiences: neither welcome nor rejection stops with the person who receives it.

When I have been welcomed, my family has felt that welcome too. They have watched me come home energized and grateful. And when I have experienced rejection or pain, they have felt that too. They have listened, sat beside me, carried some of the weight, and even physically shared my journey as ministry has moved us from place to place. People who were never directly involved in what happened still experienced its effects because they were connected to someone who was.

Suffering rarely belongs to one person alone.

Perhaps that is why Paul’s words to the Corinthians strike me differently now: “If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it, and if one part is honored, all the parts are glad.”

Paul is describing more than sympathy. He is describing connection.

Corinth desperately needed to understand that. The church was fractured by wealth, status, spiritual gifts, personalities, and competing claims of importance. Even around the Lord’s Table, some ate well while others went hungry. Their common life in Christ was being contradicted by the way they treated one another.

So Paul is not describing what Christian community automatically looks like. He is describing what the Body of Christ is called to become.

Think about what happens when you injure part of your own body. Stub your toe badly enough and your entire body reacts. Your other leg shifts your weight. Your hands instinctively reach toward the injury. Your face contorts. Your brain suddenly has difficulty thinking about anything besides that throbbing toe.

Your body does not respond, “Well, that’s really the toe’s problem.”

The suffering of one part changes the behavior of the whole.

That is what makes Paul’s image so challenging. It is easy to know another person is hurting. Suffering with them asks more. It asks us to allow someone else’s pain to affect us.

And suffering with someone does not require agreeing with them about everything.

We sometimes behave as though compassion is a verdict. If I acknowledge your pain, perhaps that means I have decided you were right. If I sit beside you, perhaps someone will assume I have chosen your side. But we can disagree with someone and still suffer with them. Several people can even be wounded by the same situation without compassion having to be rationed to whichever person we decide deserves it most.

The Body does not have to settle every disagreement before it can recognize a wound.

That truth extends beyond individual relationships. Churches, workplaces, families, governments, and other institutions can become much better at managing suffering than entering it. Complaints can be investigated. Policies can be followed. Cases can eventually be marked resolved.

But wounded people cannot.

Procedures may be necessary. Accountability, facts, and justice matter. But none of them relieves us of the responsibility to recognize the human beings standing inside the process.

People are not problems to be resolved.

Paul then turns the image around: “If one part is honored, all the parts are glad.”

That may be just as challenging. We live in a culture that teaches us to compare. Someone else’s success can feel like evidence of our failure. Even churches compare attendance, finances, ministries, and growth as though another community’s flourishing somehow diminishes our own.

Paul imagines something different.

In the Body of Christ, your joy does not threaten me. Your flourishing does not diminish me. Your gifts do not make mine less valuable. Something good happened to part of the Body, and I belong to that Body too.

In Part 11, we considered Paul’s insistence that there are no disposable parts. Now Paul takes us further. If no member is disposable, then neither is that member’s suffering irrelevant nor their joy inconsequential.

We belong to one another.

Someone is grieving. Someone has been rejected. Someone is exhausted. Someone is celebrating. Someone is healing. Someone has discovered something beautiful about themselves. Someone is becoming more fully alive.

When one part suffers, we suffer with them.

When one part is honored, we celebrate with them.

God is creating a Body—many parts, different parts, indispensable parts—learning to share one another’s burdens and one another’s joy.

Because in the Body of Christ, none of us belongs alone.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
To belong to the Body of Christ is to let another person’s suffering and joy matter to us.

PRAYER
God of compassion, teach us to suffer with those who suffer and celebrate with those who rejoice. Give us hearts that listen without judgment, remain present in pain, and rejoice without comparison. Form us into one Body, bound together in your love. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

GOD BEGINNINGS, Part 11: No Disposable Parts

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Read 1 Corinthians 12:12–22

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“For there is one body and one Spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future” (Ephesians 4:4 NLT).

A grimy human hand reaches upward from a dumpster filled with discarded mannequin heads, arms, legs, an ear, and an eye as two living hands reach down to help. The contrast between the human hand and discarded body parts evokes the truth that no person is disposable.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “No Disposable Parts” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

I love music. I mean, I really love music. Heavy metal, industrial, rock and roll, goth—get me going and I am there! My musical tastes are actually far more eclectic than those categories might suggest. I can move quite happily from Beethoven to Bon Jovi to Jewel to Stryper to, well, yes, Marilyn Manson.

At least I’m balanced!

To be honest, people are often shocked that I would listen to—or, worse yet, attend—a Marilyn Manson concert. My reaction is: Why? Would Jesus not find himself at such a concert too? Jesus was called “a glutton and a drunkard” and “a friend of tax collectors and other sinners” because of the company he kept (Matthew 11:19). He repeatedly went where respectable religious people thought respectable religious people should not go. Besides, I’ve been listening to Marilyn Manson since I was, well, a teenager—and here I grew up to become a Christian pastor. Who knew, right?!

Over the years, I’ve had several opportunities to see the band live. The last time I saw Marilyn Manson in concert, he stopped at one point and talked about something that has followed him throughout his career: people trying to dispose of him. Most recently, that story has included serious allegations of sexual abuse and the enormous public and professional fallout surrounding them. After a four-year criminal investigation, however, prosecutors ultimately declined to bring charges, determining that the domestic-violence allegations fell outside the statute of limitations and that the sexual-assault allegations could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Some of the civil claims against him were also dismissed, withdrawn, or settled.

A clarification is important here. The legal history surrounding these allegations is complicated, and some civil litigation remains ongoing. I am not attempting to adjudicate those allegations, declare Manson innocent, defend his conduct, or suggest that anyone should escape accountability for harm they may have caused. Nor does the inability of a court to hear or resolve an allegation make a survivor’s suffering untrue, let alone disposable. And, to make matters more complicated, if any of those allegations are true, then he has participated in making other people feel disposable.

Still, the point here is narrower, and deliberately uncomfortable: accountability and human dignity are not opposites. No human being is disposable.

Still, something Manson said that night struck me. People had tried to dispose of him, he said, but he had never been disposable.

That word caught my attention because Manson had been using it long before his most recent controversies. In 2000, he released a song called “The Disposable Teens.” The song gives voice to the alienation and anger of young people pushing against systems of authority and social expectations that seem to have little place for them unless they become what those systems expect.

The title itself is unsettling: disposable teens.

People young enough to still be discovering who they are, yet already receiving the message that if they do not fit, behave, believe, achieve, produce, or conform correctly, society can simply move on without them. More than two decades later, I heard the person who sang about disposable teens standing onstage insisting that he himself had never been disposable.

Sitting there listening, I found myself agreeing with him on this:

No human being is disposable.

That does not mean our actions do not matter. Human dignity does not eliminate accountability, consequences, repentance, justice, or the responsibility to repair harm. Christianity does not teach that because every person bears sacred worth, everything every person does must therefore be accepted. There is a profound difference between holding someone accountable and declaring that person expendable.

Paul makes an even more radical claim about the Christian community in 1 Corinthians 12. The church in Corinth was a mess. Its members competed over status, spiritual gifts, leadership, knowledge, wealth, and importance. Some considered themselves more significant than others. Into that fractured community, Paul introduces an image they could hardly misunderstand: a body.

One body, composed of many parts.

But Paul does something fascinating with the image. He addresses disposability from both directions. First comes the person who feels disposable. The foot looks at the hand and essentially says, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body.” The ear compares itself with the eye and reaches the same conclusion.

I know that voice. Perhaps you do too.

Because I am not like you, I do not belong. Because I cannot do what you do. Because I do not look like you. Because my gifts are different. Because my body works differently. Because my mind works differently. Because I am too old, too young, too wounded, too strange, too uncertain, too much, or somehow not enough.

Paul’s response is wonderfully straightforward: saying you do not belong does not make you stop belonging. The foot remains part of the body. The ear remains part of the body. Difference does not disqualify belonging.

Then Paul turns the argument around. Now it is no longer the foot saying, “I do not belong.” It is the eye saying to the hand, “I don’t need you.”

That is the voice of superiority rather than insecurity. It is what happens when one part of the body decides it possesses enough importance, power, ability, resources, knowledge, or status to determine whether another part is necessary. Paul rejects that sentence too. In fact, Paul says that the parts of the body that seem weakest are actually indispensable.

Notice what Paul does not say. Paul does not say the weaker parts should be tolerated because perhaps someday they will become stronger. Paul does not say everyone deserves a place because everyone can eventually be made useful. Paul does not tell the apparently weaker members to discover their hidden productivity so the rest of the body can justify keeping them around.

They are indispensable.

That distinction matters because even churches can begin measuring human worth according to usefulness. We may never say it aloud, but our questions can reveal the calculation: Can you serve? Can you teach? Can you sing? Can you give? Can you sit on a committee? Can you volunteer? Can you help us grow? Can you still do what you used to do?

There is nothing wrong with discovering and using our gifts. Paul spends considerable time talking about them. But the Body of Christ is not a machine whose parts earn their place by remaining productive.

A person lying in a nursing-home bed is not less part of Christ’s Body because they can no longer serve on a committee. A person with a disability does not need to demonstrate some inspirational hidden talent before becoming indispensable. A teenager sitting silently in the back of the sanctuary does not have to become “the future of the church” before being valued as part of the church now. And notice how often, when we speak about that future, we attach expectations about how they should look, talk, believe, behave, and belong when they get there. The exhausted person who presently needs more from the community than they can give back is not a drain on the Body. And the person whose gifts, personality, questions, identity, or way of moving through the world does not fit neatly into our existing structures is not spare equipment waiting to be discarded.

Belonging to the Body is not something we earn by proving our usefulness.

This is where Paul’s metaphor becomes particularly uncomfortable for institutions, because institutions inevitably make calculations. Budgets must balance. Programs must be evaluated. Buildings must be maintained. Organizations have to make decisions about what is sustainable and what is not. 

But people are not programs. People are not buildings. People are not line items.

The Church may sometimes have to let structures die. We may have to close programs, change traditions, merge ministries, relinquish buildings, or admit that something which once served the mission no longer does. None of those decisions makes the people connected to those structures disposable. The Body of Christ has no surplus members.

That means neither of the false conclusions Paul sets up is available to us. We cannot look at ourselves and say, “Because I am not like you, I do not belong.” And we cannot look at another person and say, “Because you are not like me, I do not need you.” The first denies the place God has given us. The second denies the place God has given someone else.

Perhaps that is why the phrase I heard at that concert stayed with me: I was never disposable.

Neither were you. Neither is the person you find difficult. Neither is the person who can no longer produce what they once produced. Neither is the person whose presence complicates the community rather than making it more efficient. Neither is the person the world has decided would be easier to ignore.

God is creating something new, and according to Paul, that new creation looks remarkably like a body: different parts, different gifts, different functions, joined into a life none possesses alone.

There are no disposable teens. There are no disposable adults. There are no disposable people.

And in the Body of Christ, there are no disposable parts.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Belonging to the Body is not something we earn by proving our usefulness.

PRAYER
God of every member, free us from believing that our differences make us unnecessary and from treating the differences of others as reasons we do not need them. Teach us to honor the dignity of every person, use our gifts without measuring our worth by them, and become a Body in which no one is treated as disposable. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

God Beginnings, Part 8: Known by Name

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Read Isaiah 43:1–7

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“’Mary!’ Jesus said. She turned to him and cried out, ‘Rabboni!’ (which is Hebrew for “Teacher”).” (John 20:16 NLT)

Mary Magdalene turns toward the risen Christ outside the empty tomb at dawn. Behind her, dark faces representing imposed identities and accusations shatter and dissolve, while Christ reaches toward her in warm resurrection light and calls her by name.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “Known by Name” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

Mary Magdalene had likely heard many things said about her. Troubled. Unclean. Possessed. Crazy. That woman. The one with the demons. Scripture tells us that Jesus had freed her from seven demons, and even after her healing, people may still have defined her by what had once afflicted her. Communities are often slow to release someone from an old reputation. A person can be restored to life while others continue calling them by the name of their former suffering.

Then, outside the empty tomb, Mary hears one word:

“Mary!”

Jesus does not call her by her history, her affliction, or her social category. Jesus calls her by name.

That moment changes everything. The tomb is still there. Mary’s grief has been real. The violence that killed Jesus has not been erased. Yet when the risen Christ speaks her name, Mary recognizes that death has not ended the story. She is personally known by the One who calls life out of death.

Through the prophet Isaiah, God spoke with that same intimacy to a people whose circumstances had made them feel forgotten. They had experienced judgment, displacement, and uncertainty. Their life together had been wounded, and the future before them remained unclear. Yet God began not with their failures or their captivity, but with a reminder of who formed them:

“I have called you by name; you are mine.”

God’s knowledge of Israel was not merely informational. God did not simply know facts about the people. God created, formed, redeemed, named, accompanied, and gathered them. They were known through relationship. They belonged to God, not because they had successfully earned recognition, but because God’s faithfulness reached them even within exile.

Friends, God knows us by name and calls us into new life.

Being known by God does not mean that deep waters, raging rivers, or consuming fires will never come. Isaiah promises no such exemption. God’s people will pass through dangerous places. What God promises is presence: the waters will not overwhelm them, the rivers will not sweep them away, and the fire will not consume them.

Those forces may affect their lives, but they do not get to define their identities. Exile does not erase their belonging. Suffering does not cancel their worth. Captivity does not become their name.

When God says, “You are mine,” this is not the possessive claim of someone trying to control another person. Human beings often use belonging as an excuse to dominate: You are mine, so I decide who you must be. You belong here, so you must conform. We accepted you, so you owe us the version of yourself we prefer.

God’s claim moves in the opposite direction. God refuses to surrender a person’s identity to captivity, shame, danger, or the judgments of others. God’s naming restores belonging; it does not remove personhood.

The world often names people in order to control them. God calls people by name in order to restore them.

Our world is skilled at assigning labels. People are called respectable or embarrassing, normal or deviant, faithful or troublesome, useful or disposable. A person may be reduced to what happened to them, something they once did, a condition with which they live, the body they inhabit, the person they love, or the ways they fail to meet someone else’s expectations.

Institutions assign names too. Sometimes they decide who is welcome, who may speak, who possesses authority, and whose testimony can be trusted. They may insist that people hide pieces of themselves, perform an approved identity, or answer to labels that make everyone else more comfortable.

Even the Church can become more invested in naming people than in knowing them. We may attach a category to someone and imagine that we have understood the whole person. We may speak about people without listening to them. We may demand that they answer to identities formed by our fear, prejudice, theology, or need for control—and then call that demand faithfulness.

The unsettling question is unavoidable:

Does the Church help people hear God calling their names, or demand that they answer to names God never gave them?

Mary stands before the risen Christ carrying grief, confusion, and a history others may have used against her. Jesus does not reduce her to any of it. Jesus calls her, “Mary.”

In hearing her name, Mary recognizes Christ. She also receives a new beginning. Jesus does not merely comfort her and send her back into silence. Mary is called into witness. The woman whose society might have questioned or dismissed her testimony becomes the one entrusted to announce resurrection to the disciples. What’s more, Jesus then sends her, “that woman”, to be the first preacher of the Gospel!

Christ’s recognition does not wait for institutional permission.

That does not mean God’s call invents an entirely different person or removes everything that came before. Mary remained Mary. Her history remained part of her story. But neither her suffering nor the labels attached to it could contain what she was becoming. The risen Christ called the person who had always been there into a life that death, shame, and social judgment could not prevent.

God knows who we are, friends—even when the world does not.

God knows us beneath the labels others have imposed, beneath the roles we have learned to perform, and beneath the false selves we have constructed to remain acceptable. God does not call us away from the person God created. God calls us out of whatever has prevented that person from living fully.

A God beginning may start with hearing our name spoken beyond all the noise that tried to rename us. It may begin when we discover that God has never confused us with our wounds, our failures, or the categories others used to contain us. It may begin when we finally trust that being fully known by God does not erase us—it restores us.

The risen Christ still stands near places we have mistaken for endings. Christ still calls people whom the world has mislabeled, underestimated, or dismissed. Christ still speaks our names—not to control who we may become, but to call us into resurrection life.

Listen.

God knows your name.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
God knows us by name and calls us into new life.

PRAYER
God who creates, forms, and restores us, help us hear your voice beyond every label that has diminished or confined us. Teach us to recognize others as people you know by name, and give us courage to answer when you call us into new life. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

GOD BEGINNINGS, part 1: The Invitation

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An empty hospital mental health evaluation room sits in quiet shadow. A hospital gown is draped over a lone chair, while an open door at the far end floods the sterile space with warm light. The contrast between darkness and light subtly symbolizes Christ's invitation meeting us in our vulnerability before anything has been repaired.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “God Beginnings, Part 1: The Invitation” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

Read Matthew 11:28-30

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Then Jesus said, ‘Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.’” (Matthew 11:28–30 NLT)

An empty hospital mental health evaluation room sits in quiet shadow. A hospital gown is draped over a lone chair, while an open door at the far end floods the sterile space with warm light. The contrast between darkness and light subtly symbolizes Christ's invitation meeting us in our vulnerability before anything has been repaired.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “God Beginnings, Part 1: The Invitation” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

I was seventeen. I’d been smoking, and my parents—who never liked it anyway—took the cigarettes away, probably as much for my attitude as for the habit itself. What followed wasn’t rational. A nicotine fit collided with a panic attack, and the panic curdled into anger I couldn’t get a hold of. My parents called the police. Not to punish me—to help me. It was a wellness check, nothing more. No record. No charges. Just people trying to keep a kid from hurting himself or someone else.

I ended up in a hospital room for a mental health evaluation. They took my clothes and my possessions and put me in a gown. The room was dark. I sat there—stripped of everything that was mine, including the version of myself I usually presented to the world—waiting until someone decided it was time to see me.

I tell you this not to relive it, but because that room is where I first understood something about the word “Come.”

The EMS worker who transported me that night knew me. Before she took me in, she let me have one more cigarette and told me, only half-joking, that next time I wanted a ride to the hospital, I could just call her directly. I laughed. It was funny. But underneath the joke was something else—she saw me exactly as I was, mid-crisis, out of control, undignified, and she didn’t wait for me to compose myself before she offered care. Her humor was the care. I felt heard. I felt, strange as it sounds, invited.

That’s the shape of what Jesus says in Matthew 11. “Come” isn’t a summons issued once you’ve gotten yourself together. It isn’t conditional on sobriety of mind, composure of spirit, or a resolved account of how you got here. It’s imperative and immediate—present tense, no clause attached. Jesus doesn’t say “come, once you’ve made sense of things.” He says come, full stop, to people already weary and already burdened, mid-crisis, before any of it is resolved.

That’s worth sitting with, because trust of this kind is not the same as passivity. Coming to Christ weary is itself the first act—the initial movement, distinct from the fixing, explaining, or composing we assume has to happen first. Most of what passes for spiritual formation quietly reverses this order: believe correctly, behave rightly, and then you belong. Jesus inverts it. Belonging comes first. Trust becomes the doorway everything else walks through—not the reward waiting at the far end of it.

Psalm 46 makes the same claim from a different angle. God is called refuge and strength before any crisis is described, and only after that does the psalm picture the earth giving way, mountains collapsing into churning water—total upheaval—and says: even there, no fear. The help was never contingent on the chaos settling down first. It’s there inside the collapse.

This is where the invitation gets uncomfortable in a useful way. Many of us have quietly built our worth around having things together—composure as a kind of currency we assume we need before we’re welcome anywhere, including before God. That myth runs deep, and it doesn’t only live in individuals. Churches build the same architecture. Congregations, like people, often absorb the sense that vitality must be proven before grace is extended—that struggling is disqualifying rather than simply human. That’s a thread this series will pull harder on later. For today, it’s enough to notice: the logic of “prove it, then belong” is not the logic of “Come.”

The room I sat in that night wasn’t fixed by the time I left it. But something had already happened before any fixing began. Someone came toward me exactly as I was, and that was enough to be the beginning of something.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Christ’s invitation was never waiting on you to arrive composed.

PRAYER
God, we come as we are—unfinished, undignified, still in the middle of what we haven’t resolved. Forgive us for believing we must earn a welcome before we receive one. Meet us before the mending starts. Teach us to trust that your invitation was never contingent on our readiness. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic).

Devotional

THE FORCE WITHIN, part 13: Identity and Belonging

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Read Ephesians 2:10-13

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“But to all who believed him and accepted him, he gave the right to become children of God.” – John 1:12 (NLT)

From the eternal struggle between light and darkness to the quest for redemption and the power of hope, Star Wars offers profound insights into the human condition and the mysteries of the divine. Through the Force, the saga explores the interconnectedness of all life and the call to embrace our inner potential for goodness and compassion. As we journey through the galaxy, we will be uncovering the transformative truths that resonate deeply with our own faith journeys.

Part 13: Identity and Belonging. In the vast Star Wars galaxy, amidst the battles between the light and dark sides of the Force, lies a story of a young woman named Jyn Erso. Her journey in “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” reflects the universal struggle of navigating identity and belonging. Jyn’s path mirrors our own quest to find our place in the world and discover who we are meant to be.

Jyn’s early life was marred by chaos and uncertainty. Separated from her family at a tender age, she learned the harsh reality of survival in a galaxy torn apart by conflict. Her days were spent on the fringes of society, scraping by through whatever means necessary. In the relentless pursuit of survival, Jyn’s understanding of herself became obscured, buried beneath layers of self-preservation.

Yet, amidst the shadows of her past, glimmers of hope emerged. In the form of companions like Cassian Andor, a dedicated rebel intelligence officer, and Chirrut Îmwe, a blind warrior monk attuned to the Force, Jyn found unexpected allies who saw beyond her facade of toughness. They recognized her potential for greatness, even when she couldn’t see it herself.

Cassian, with his unwavering determination and sense of duty, challenged Jyn to confront her inner turmoil and embrace her role in the fight against the Empire. His steadfast belief in her abilities served as a beacon of light in the darkness, guiding her toward a deeper understanding of her purpose.

Similarly, Chirrut’s wisdom and spiritual insight provided Jyn with a different perspective on life and the Force. Through his teachings, she began to recognize the interconnectedness of all things and the importance of embracing her true self, flaws and all.

As Jyn journeyed alongside her comrades in the Rebel Alliance, she gradually shed the layers of fear and doubt that had shrouded her identity. With each victory and setback, she grew stronger in her convictions and more resolute in her determination to make a difference.

In the climactic moments of “Rogue One,” Jyn’s transformation reaches its apex as she leads a daring mission to steal the Death Star plans. In that moment of selfless sacrifice, she discovers the true meaning of belonging—not just to a cause or a group, but to something greater than herself.

Through Jyn’s story, we’re reminded that our past does not define us, and our circumstances do not determine our worth. Like Jyn, we may face moments of doubt and uncertainty, but with faith and perseverance, we can uncover the truth of who we are meant to be.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
As you journey through life, remember that your identity is not shaped by your past or your present circumstances. You are a beloved child of God, called to a purpose greater than yourself. Embrace your true identity and find belonging in the love of God.

PRAYER
Lord God, thank You for the gift of identity and belonging found in You. Help us to see ourselves through Your eyes and to walk confidently in the truth of who You’ve created us to be. Guide us as we navigate life’s challenges, knowing that our ultimate belonging is found in You alone. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT, an AI language model developed by OpenAI.