OVERCOMING THE
SPIRIT OF REJECTION (Part I)
For quite some
time, many of you have experienced a pattern of pain in your lives. It
seems that, although you have tried your best to be open and accepting of
others, your unconditional love is not always reciprocated. Fact is, oftentimes
you feel ignored, excluded, or simply tolerated by people who are expected to
GET YOU, that is, to understand what you are all about. But somehow, they
fail to SEE YOUR HEART, i.e. who you REALLY are or where you are coming from.
Some of those
people (perhaps even close family and friends) might have even LABELED you, using
unforgettable, soul piercing and perplexing words. They SEE you one way –
through their own perspectives or life experiences – and since they are SURE
that you must really be the person they have pegged you to be, they not only
place you in a permanent pigeon-hole, they communicate their narrow and
restricted image of you to others. All of this truly hurts – much more
than you are willing to admit or talk about to others. So, my friend, what
can you do?
Before delving into
the details of proactive and positive strategies for handling REJECTION, I want
to share some wonderful news with you. YOU ARE NOT A REJECT! YOU
HAVE BEEN “ACCEPTED IN THE BELOVED!” (Ephesians 1:5-6) That is, the FATHER has
already ACCEPTED YOU as a prime candidate for grace and glory. Your
simple requirement is to ACCEPT HIS SON and to cut a constant covenant with
Him. Your growing intimacy with HIM will produce both the fruit and gifts
of the Spirit in your life. My friend, GOD has very positive plans for
you, i.e. “plans to prosper you and not harm you, plans to give you hope and a
future.” (Jeremiah 29:11)
In order to be
effective with this devotional, I must be totally transparent. I will
elaborate on something I have mentioned before. Since birth, I have
struggled with a profound speech impediment. Today, when others hear me
teaching and preaching, they typically have difficulty believing this since God
has been so gracious and transformational in my life. But my childhood struggle
to speak clearly was (and is) a monumental force in my personal development.
How can I explain my feelings about this to you? SPEECH is such an
integral part of daily life. It is the means and mechanism for
communicating our desires and dreams, our pains and our pleasures. NOT to
have the capacity to communicate on a level where one is absolutely SURE that
others understand produces an internal struggle of monumental proportions.
So even though I
was raised in a Christian home, within a positive cocoon-of-love and surrounded
by marvelous parents and tremendous siblings, somehow I FELT LESS THAN OTHERS.
Whenever I needed to say something twice or even thrice to be understood,
I FELT SUPREMELY REJECTED. My young mind was incapable of processing the
possibility that this might be a temporary problem. And believe it or
not, even today when I am speaking, I am still UNSURE if people clearly
comprehend the words that I speak! It is important to note that others
were not rejecting me or classifying me as someone who lacked the ability to
speak. In truth, I was rejecting and negatively classifying MYSELF!
There is another
important phenomenon to highlight here. Feelings of inadequacy never
occur in a vacuum. In other words, we human beings have the tendency to
filter ALL life experiences through what we perceive as the WEAKEST LINK within
ourselves. For example, if as a child I was selected last in a pick-up
game of basketball, I interpreted it as REJECTION OF ME, when in reality I was
a mediocre basketball player. Later, I discovered that I could excel in
football and track and field, but those early ‘rejection episodes’ on the
basketball court (amplified by my sense of insecurity about my speech) were
difficult childhood experiences.
Kingdom Principle
Number One: SATAN LEVERAGES OUR FEELINGS OF INADEQUACY TO CONTROL OUR ATTITUDES
AND ACTIONS, AND TO PRODUCE LONG-TERM NEGATIVE RESULTS.
There is both good
news and bad news to mine from this first Kingdom principle. The BAD NEWS
is that ALL of us have SOMETHING that causes us to struggle with ourselves,
whether it is an ongoing physical challenge, the tragic death of a loved one, a
traumatic childhood experience, a sense of inferiority or superiority, academic
difficulties, or whatever one’s individual case may be. Indeed, that is
the nature of the human condition.
The GOOD NEWS is
this: While Satan’s agenda is to intensify our emotional struggle, to produce
long-term negative fall-out, GOD’S AGENDA
IS TO TRANSFORM AND USE OUR SHORTCOMINGS in ways that enable us to
systematically grow stronger and wiser, so we can assist others with similar
life experiences and thereby become key players in developing the Kingdom of
God. Know this: To offset our PERCEIVED
MINUSES, God sovereignly grants us UNIQUE PLUSES, both for our present sense of balance and for
our future achievement. Have you discovered yours yet?
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