I still remember the formula: Shrink-to-fit button-fly Levi’s from Levi Strauss & Co. Simple leather belt. Solid long-sleeve shirt. Matching socks. Penny loafers with shiny pennies tucked just right.
At Longmont Junior High, that outfit meant one thing: You were in.
And being “in” wasn’t really about fashion. It was about survival. It meant safe from ridicule. Safe from invisibility. Safe from being the one everyone looked at sideways.
Junior high teaches us quickly: Belonging = safety.
What I didn’t know then was how long that equation would live inside me.
The clothes change as we grow up, but the instinct stays. We just update the wardrobe: If I believe the right things, I’m safe. If I behave the right way, I’m safe. If I’m on the right side, I’m safe.
When faith gets layered onto that wiring, God quietly becomes the new hallway dynamic. It’s the hallway who votes who’s in and who’s out. In the hallway, safety is conditional. What if I’m wearing the wrong stuff? What if I’m not good enough?
And this is junior-high survival strategy wearing grown-up religious clothes.
Jesus interrupts this whole system of thinking.
In the Incarnation, God doesn’t wait for the right outfit. God steps into the hallway himself, not as evaluator, but as participant. And on the Cross, Jesus enters the very places where humans feel most unsafe: rejection, shame, exposure, violence, abandonment.
Not to say, “Fix yourself.” But to reveal something we couldn’t imagine: We were never outside to begin with. Safety is not achieved. Safety is given.
Not through conformity. Not through performance. But through God’s unbroken movement toward us.
If God then is fundamentally safe, not volatile, not shifting between love and threat, then everything about the hallway shifts. I no longer have to manage my image. I no longer relate to God from anxiety. I no longer divide the world into “us safe” and “them unsafe.”
The safety I spent years trying to manufacture socially is already grounded in who God is.
Back then, Levi’s meant: I belong, so I can breathe.
Now faith says: You belong before you perform, so you can live.
Junior high taught me to look for safety in approval.
Jesus shows me safety in union.
And that kind of safety doesn’t shrink in the wash.