The Loners, the Outsiders and Jesus

I recently found myself invited to speak at a gathering. Understanding it was about the extraordinary year I had journeyed through — illness, survival, transformation, and all the unexpected ways suffering reshapes a person — I happily agreed. We confirmed a date and exchanged warm messages.

As the conversation unfolded, it became clear there were certain topics that sat outside the comfort of the community I would be speaking with. Nothing confrontational was said, yet I found myself quietly unsettled by the realisation of how easily human beings can become 'acceptable' or 'unacceptable' depending on the spaces we inhabit.

The experience lingered with me.

Not because I had intended to speak about sexuality or inclusion specifically, but because it made me reflect on how often we unconsciously create invisible boundaries around who feels safe to acknowledge, welcome, or fully see.

Who are the people we quietly learn not to speak about? Whose humanity makes us uncomfortable? Whose stories disrupt the neatness of our worldview?

It made me think about how easily we can construct lives that are comfortable. We live in a time where it is so easy to surround ourselves with people who think like us, vote like us, worship like us. All the people in our lives reassuring us that our perspective is the correct one.

We also live in a time where there is so much information available to us — whether through newspapers, television, books, podcasts, blogs and articles, social media, even artificial intelligence! — that we can curate the information we consume to confirm the narratives we already feel comfortable with. On top of this, the algorithms behind the digital information we consume are designed to perfectly cater to our individual preferences and, while they can often provoke rage, they somehow rarely challenge our worldview.

And slowly, despite us thinking we have so many options available to us and perhaps without even noticing, our world becomes smaller.

Not safer, necessarily. Just narrower.

I wonder if much of spiritual and emotional maturity is the willingness to stay open when we feel discomfort rise within us. To resist the instinct to retreat into certainty. To remain curious instead of defensive.

Because discomfort can be a doorway.

The older I get, the more I notice how Jesus is rarely found at the centre of power and certainty. He seems far more likely to be lingering at the edges, among people who have been excluded, misunderstood, judged, or erased from the conversation.

The Gospels are full of this pattern.

In the Gospels, Jesus consistently moves towards those society prefers to keep at a distance: the outsiders, the complicated, the inconvenient, the judged, the lonely, the sick, the poor, the ones who don't neatly fit into any acceptable categories. Again and again, religious people were positively scandalised by the company he kept!

And it seems they still are.

I have often found more honesty and sacred depth in the places where the ‘unacceptable’ gather than in the polished religious spaces. Around tables with people carrying deep wounds. In conversations with those who feel unsure of their place in the world. Among the rainbow community. With the lonely. Together with those who have stopped pretending they have life neatly wrapped up with pretty theological ribbon.

Perhaps once you've been there yourself — experienced grief, shame, illness, struggle, or exclusion — you begin to recognise the other people on the edges of belonging.

And at the edges, relationships become all the more important.

I’ve stopped asking, “Who is acceptable?” And started asking, “Who needs love?”

I am increasingly convinced that faith was never meant to make us less accepting of difference or to inspire more fear of the ‘other’. Surely Christ invites us toward a table wide enough for all who wish to sit, and we are not the gatekeepers. Surely Christ calls us into deeper compassion, not tighter exclusion.

Not because truth doesn’t matter. But because “the greatest of these is love”.

Love takes us beyond ourselves, which is perhaps why holy ground can be found in the most uncomfortable places.

Because sometimes the very people we are taught to avoid are the ones who will teach us the most about grace and will show us how to love our neighbours most fiercely.

A short Celtic blessing just for you:

May we have the courage to walk toward one another, not away.

May our tables grow wider, our hearts grow softer, and our fear grow smaller.

And may we find Christ already waiting for us in the unlikely places, among the people we were told not to see.

Blessings, Amanda

Photo by Chad Stembridge on Unsplash.