I agree with this.

I'm a single 32-year old in a family ward. I'm one of 2 single women without kids, one of maybe 3-5 without kids if you count the married couples with infertility, and I'm the only single person under ~45 in the ward. I'm the only single, childless woman in my entire extended family -- most of who were married by 21-24. It's very easy to feel like no one understands my situation. I most likely won't get married in this life, if my past ~16 years of dating experience are anything to go by, and that usually doesn't bother me, but not being a mother is very hard. Especially knowing how many kids in the world are without parents, the fact that single women are discouraged from adopting is something I haven't fully made peace with yet.

It can be very easy to feel alone and to feel like no one understands what I'm going through. But I have to remind myself that everyone sitting around me in church is going through trials that are just as painful as mine. Every family member has unbearably hard trials. Being married and having kids doesn't lessen their pain or preclude them from it.

Satan uses everyone's pain to make them feel like they're the odd one out, that no one could understand or be willing to empathize, that they're being excluded from a blessing that everyone else has access to. It's a lie he tells all of us. It doesn't matter whether the trial is marriage, infertility, abuse, addiction, mental illness, finances, work/education, or death. Everyone is experiencing a situation that Satan will use at any chance he can to tell them they don't belong, that everyone else is more faithful, more blessed, more accepted by the church and the Lord.

Something I've found that has helped me to feel more "part of the chapel" is to put forth more effort than I necessarily want to -- my natural instincts are to show up at church, sit alone in the back, socialize when people approach me first, and go home. But when I show up, find someone to sit by (and there's always someone), be the first to reach out to someone, speak up in lessons, etc. I find that this is when I feel like I belong, and more importantly, this is when I find others who also have been feeling like they don't belong.

We have to remember that the church is us, all of us together, the body of Christ. And the body of Christ wasn't ever meant to be comprised of perfect little nuclear families with white picket fences -- that would be like trying to have a body made from all thumbs. The body of Christ needs ankles and kneecaps and earlobes and eyebrows just like the church needs singles and couples with infertility and divorcees and addicts and widows and the mentally ill.