Woolly Pterodactyl’s and belonging
So, I’m walking down my road and notice someone has changed the knitted animal on top of the post box.
You read that right. There’s someone out there who crochets cartoons, animals, plants, tiny scenes — and wraps them around local postboxes. They change all the time.
Just recently, it’s a pterodactyl perched on top of my nearest one.
It makes me wonder who they are — this Banksy of woolen joy — and what it takes to quietly care about a place like this. Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? Church folk talk frequestly about belonging to a community, but most of the time we’re just passing through it. We walk the same streets, grab our coffee, drive to work, wave at the neighbour whose name we can’t quite remember… and we call that community.
But belonging isn’t something you stumble into. It’s something you practice. It’s noticing the post-box topper and deciding it matters. It’s learning who lives behind the hedges. It’s being curious enough to care about.
If I’m honest, I’m in a season where I’m questioning how grounded I actually am in my local community. I spend so much time thinking about how to help people find belonging — through things like Ocean Church and my work at the YMCA— but sometimes I catch myself wondering if I’ve stopped doing that myself. There are seasons where I’ve been physically here but not really here. Busy doing things for the community without really being with it. Always planning the next thing, thinking about what’s over there, not what’s right here.
And then there are moments when I start to inhabit this place again. When Ocean Church gathers by the river and someone spots a familiar face and waves them over. When a few of us head out on a walk we’ve done a hundred times before, and yet it still feels new. When my boys race off in the park to find school friends, and I find myself chatting with parents I’ve slowly built a friendship with. Those are the moments that remind me this isn’t just where I live — it’s where I belong.
There’s this ancient letter in the Bible that ive been chewing on lately. It’s from the prophet Jeremiah to a bunch of displaced people who didn’t want to be where they were. They were longing to get back home — back to the good old days — but Jeremiah gives them this outrageous instruction:
“This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: ‘Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce.
Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease.
Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.’”
(Jeremiah 29:4–7)
It’s not a message about escaping or surviving. It’s a message about rooting. Build something. Plant something. Love someone. Become part of the ecosystem of that place. Seek its peace, its wholeness — because your wellbeing and the wellbeing of your place are tied together.
Maybe that’s the invitation for me right now. Maybe that’s the invitation for Ocean Church too — to not just be in this community, but to belong to it. A temptation for us is to imagine BCP as a stage for our adventures or a useful place to find peace.
I sometimes wonder if the Church — not just ours, but the whole idea of church — has become too portable. We can livestream a service, drive across towns, float between groups, pick and choose experiences. None of that is bad. But the danger is we become spiritual tourists, collecting moments instead of making homes. Jeremiah’s words call us back to something slower, more rooted, more inconvenient. They remind us that God doesn’t just show up when we gather; God shows up when we stay. When we plant gardens, cook meals, know our neighbours, and knit awesome pterodactyls for postboxes.
So I’m asking myself — and maybe you too — what would it look like to truly inhabit your place? To walk your streets like a pilgrim instead of a passer-by? To know the stories of the land and the people who live on it? To see your neighbourhood not as background noise but as the actual ground where faith gets practiced?
Belonging, I’m learning, doesn’t happen when you finally find the right place. It happens when you decide to stay long enough to fall in love with the one you’re already in.
