I’m 50, a minute away from 51 years old, and I’ve been searching for belonging through faith my whole life. I am uncertain, conflicted, more unkind than I like and never very faithful. I keep meeting people who believe in God — kind people, connected to their communities and to each other, faithful people — and I want what they have.

But wanting doesn’t make it so. There is a wall between me and faith, a wall between me and the shining experience of those to whom I am most drawn.

I’m not Mennonite, although I started going to a Mennonite Brethren church in Canada nearly 20 years ago. I stayed for eight years — making friends, singing songs, going to the worship service, participating in a care group — and still felt on the outside looking in.

Although this was a conservative congregation politically, it wasn’t our different politics that were a barrier to me. After all, I kept coming back week after week and finding some of my dearest friends. It was the wall between me and belief, the wall between me and a God that made sense.

Before the Mennonite Brethren church, I had attended a United Church of Christ congregation in Maryland for two years. There, week after week, the pastor spoke about the people power, about extending loving hands of welcome — not to draw people to the church, not as recruitment, but as an extension of the loving hands of Christ.

Go out into the world and be kind. Share love. Be a vessel of generosity and goodness.

I needed then, and need today, this weekly reminder. I am not naturally kind or generous. I am naturally pinch-faced, not so much full of doubt as blocked from even envisioning a deity about whom to feel doubt. But I wish I could. And I hoped then, as I hope now, that the desire for faith and the desire to be good count for something.

I’ve spent all these years trying to find a belief while trying to make up for being me — an exhausting combination of activities. Sometimes I don’t bother. Sometimes I just eat ice cream and watch British mysteries on TV.

Recently, living in Maryland again, I was drawn to attend another Mennonite church. I could go back to the UCC church I went to all those years ago, in that space where I first heard about God in a way I could understand. But that pastor has retired (in other news, I married him), so the message from the pulpit isn’t quite the same.

Now it is in this Mennonite congregation that I am reminded of the people power. I’m reminded of the call to do good in God’s name, of the promise that we can be better versions of ourselves. We can extend a welcome. We can offer care.

I wrote this article in response to an Anabaptist World call for submissions that asked how readers had experienced Christ’s inward peace and if that peace had led to outward action, peacemaking or reconciliation.

I thought of this after a day spent working on landscaping with some of the members of my new congregation. It was a joyful time of physical labor, laughter, conversation and collective action on something small (a plot of land) and something large (community), and I left it happy in a way that is beyond words.

And so, my answer to this question is the opposite: I have experienced calming peace through community with others, through positive action. For me, it is not the inward peace that leads to outward action but the outward action that brings peace.

The seeking of peace has made me a frequent churchgoer, even during all the years I felt as though I was on the outside looking in. Each week I am called to action, to go out with heart and hands of service.

Sometimes I remember this is my mission for about 15 minutes on Sunday morning. If I am lucky, I remember it longer.

In those moments of remembering, it is in the action, in the community, in the tenderness, in the kindness, in the laughter and the conversation, that I find peace.

Maybe, after 35 years of searching, I am coming to understand: God makes us in God’s own image — you, that neighbor kid who keeps popping by your house for cookies, and me. And if God makes us in God’s own image, then God made me fat and full of swear words, uncertain, not very faithful, not even Mennonite. This imperfect person is called into community and into service — and, in both spaces, finds peace.

Kyla Hanington attends Hyattsville Mennonite Church in Maryland. She is a human rights worker, mediator and writer. She likes to take pictures of birds.