No Room

I am reaching a point where I think I'm going to have to find a new church. I don't have any place in mine anymore. There's nobody who is in the same place in life as me, there is no Sunday School class where I fit, no group that I can fellowship with and share with, and all the joy I used to have at being a part of it is fading away.

This is my home church as in the church I was carried to as an infant, went to Vacation Bible School as a child, was baptized in, and was a part of the youth group until I graduated and went to college. My family has gone here, my parents and my grandparents, as long as I can remember. I still have extended family here, too. So why don't I fit?

I have wracked my brain trying to figure out why I feel so separate. Part of it is the aforementioned place in life. I am single. I don't have any children. I am one of only maybe three not-so-young adults in my whole church who can say that. The other singles are twenty-somethings who are only really waiting for the ring. The Sunday School class for people my age is filled with people with young children, and of course, as seems to be the case, their lives are dominated by telling stories about those children and taking care of those children.

I'm not knocking having kids. I would love to think that someday I will have them myself. However, that's not an experience I know anything about, so being surrounded by it makes me feel very, very out of place. While I've more or less accepted the inevitable fact most of my friends have been consumed by parenting, I haven't been and may never be. Isn't there some place, any place for people like me?

I have been trying to fill in with service in areas that are needed. I do the bulletin for our church and I play the organ on Sunday nights and as a sub on Sunday mornings, but despite these rolls, I still feel invisible and out of place. I don't know what I'm going to do about it because these rolls of service also bind me to the church. Now one of those rolls of service has changed, too, and I'm worried that the joy that comes from that is going to disappear.

I don't know what to do. I don't really want to leave my church, but I just wish there was some place in it that I felt like I really fit and was more than just a functionary doing my job and slipping quietly back into the shadows when the "real" members show up.