God Is Not Mad at You: You Can Experience Real Love, Acceptance & Guilt-free Living (10 page)

I have dry eyes and frequently have to put thick eye drops in my eyes for moisture. After I use them, my vision is blurry for a while and I can’t see clearly. I can see, but everything I see is distorted. That is the way we see the world and ourselves when we are operating out of a root of rejection and feelings of worthlessness. Our perception of reality is blurred, and we misjudge many things. We may imagine that someone is ignoring us when the truth is that they didn’t even see us.

I vividly recall a woman who attended some of my weekly Bible studies in the 1980s. A friend informed me that the lady, whom we will call Jane (not her real name), was deeply hurt because I never talked to her. I was shocked when I heard it because I didn’t remember seeing the lady. I knew her and knew she attended my teaching sessions, but so did five hundred other women, and I could not possibly personally speak with every one of them.

I prayed about this situation because it was not my desire to hurt anyone, and I felt that God showed me that He purposely
didn’t let me notice her, because she wanted attention from me for the wrong reason. She was very insecure and wanted the attention to make her feel better about herself. God wanted her to come to Him to have her needs met. He wanted her to find her value in His love for her. I am happy to say that Jane ended up receiving healing from God and worked on my staff for twenty years. Even then, I still did not see her very often because of the area she worked in, but it didn’t matter to her because she no longer
needed
me to pay attention to her.

I would like to say that everyone who is insecure receives this type of healing and goes on to fulfill his or her destiny; sadly, that is not the case. But it can be if he or she will learn to see clearly.

The way we view everything in life is determined by our inner thought life. We see through our own thoughts, and if those thoughts are in error, then we see things in a wrong way.

For example, many married couples have difficulty communicating. They begin to discuss an issue, and before long they find themselves angry and arguing about things that have nothing at all to do with the thing they intended to discuss. They get lost in a maze of accusation and frustration, and the conversation ends with one or the other of them throwing their hands up in the air in exasperation and saying, “I just cannot talk to you about anything!”

Does that sound familiar? It does to me, because Dave and I went through it countless times until I learned that my old wounds of rejection were affecting my perception. I wasn’t seeing clearly and I believed all sorts of things that just were not true. For example, if Dave didn’t agree with me on all points, I received his disagreement as a rejection of me as a person, rather than a rejection of my opinion. If he didn’t agree with me on everything (and I do mean everything), then I felt wounded and unloved.
Those feelings led me to blame him for the way I felt and then attempt to manipulate him into agreeing with me.

I recall getting so confused during those times. It frustrated me that we couldn’t seem to talk about things, but I honestly did not know what was wrong! I assumed it was Dave being stubborn, but eventually I found out that the root of rejection in my life was still coloring all my conversations, and especially confrontation.

We must let God remove the wrong perceptions that color our thinking and replace them with right, godly perceptions about ourselves and others. This is done as our mind is renewed through studying God’s Word.

If we are not thinking clearly, we might think we are not capable of doing something that in reality we could do very well if we would only step out and try. We might view ourselves as a failure waiting to happen because of things that have been said to us during our life, but what does God say? He says that we can do all things through Him, and that we need not fear man or failure. We can live boldly, and we can try things to find out if we can do them or not. How will you ever know what you are good at if you are so afraid of failure that you never try to do anything?

We make every effort to not experience the pain of rejection, and this often causes us to let our feelings dictate our behavior and choices. We need to live beyond our feelings. The book of Proverbs encourages us repeatedly to get skillful and godly wisdom, to get understanding (comprehension and discernment). This means we are to learn to think clearly, or to learn to think with the mind of the spirit, instead of the mind of the flesh.

When we think naturally, according to our own views and feelings, we are thinking with the mind of the flesh. God’s Word states that this is sense and reason without the Holy Spirit, and that it
brings us death and all the miseries that arise from sin (Romans 8:6). This morning I noticed that I felt tense, and I wasn’t relaxed and didn’t know why. Instead of just trying to press through the day and be confused all day about what was wrong with me, I stopped and asked God for understanding and discernment. I knew that was not the way God wants me to feel, so what was behind it? I quickly realized that I was vaguely worrying about something that someone I love was doing that I thought was not a good choice. It was something I could not control and in reality was none of my business. My only option was to pray and trust God to reveal truth to the person if he was making a mistake in his decision.

Taking the time to think more clearly enabled me to press past my upset and go ahead and enjoy my day. It enabled me to think with the mind of the Holy Spirit. I invited Him into my thinking when I asked for wisdom and discernment. He helped me see the situation clearly. I encourage you to stop any time you feel pressure, upset, frustration or tension and ask God to show you why you feel that way. You will be able to see more clearly and it will help you move past the problem.

I urge you to pray daily for wisdom to flow through you, and for deep discernment and understanding. Ask God for truth in every situation. Don’t be afraid to face truth if you are the one that is deceived. Being free is much more important than being right. It was a bit difficult for me to face the reality that most of the arguments Dave and I had were the result of my old wounds. It was even more difficult to apologize and tell him that I knew it was mostly my fault, but swallowing my pride was a small price to pay for freedom.

If you still react to people and situations out of old wounds of rejection, abandonment or abuse, you can be free. Not only will you enjoy your freedom, but the other people in your life will enjoy it also. I know it was very difficult for Dave all the years I wasn’t thinking clearly and reacted to everything emotionally, instead of with the mind of the Spirit. Your willingness to change will be a blessing to many people.

People who devalue themselves and have a root of rejection don’t handle confrontation or any kind of correction very well. They usually become defensive and try to convince the people confronting them that they are wrong in their assessment of them.

No one enjoys being told they are wrong about something and that they need to change, but a secure individual can handle it much better than an insecure one. Accepting God’s love and approval and being rooted in it will help us receive confrontation with a good attitude. The person confronting us may or may not be right, but at least we can listen without becoming angry.

If you can handle knowing that you are not perfect, it won’t upset you when other people tell you that you are not. Seminary professor and author Steve Brown has learned what he calls the Bingo Retort. After hearing him speak at a seminar, a man came to him offering several corrections. He began his confrontation with, “What you said today grieved my heart. I think you are arrogant, rude and prideful,” and Steve replied, “Bingo, you have read me well; if you had known me several years ago, you would have been even more grieved.” Steve is not afraid to be challenged, because he already knows he is not perfect. He says that when
people tell him he is wrong about something, he says, “Bingo, I am wrong at least 50 percent of the time.” Or, if someone tells him he is selfish, he says, “Bingo, my mother told me the same thing, and my wife knows it, too.”

Just think how much anger and emotional pain this saves him. If someone rejects us because we are not perfect, it won’t bother us if we are already aware that we are not perfect and have no problem with it. It is not really what people say and do to us that makes us miserable, but how we respond. If we have a healthy attitude toward ourselves, we won’t be bothered by what others think.

Yesterday, I went to an appointment I had and a woman recognized me. She asked if she could hug me and while doing so said, “I don’t care what people say about you; I think you are wonderful!” She could have just said, “I hear a lot of people say bad things about you.” I admit that I felt a little pinch of pain when she said it, but I quickly shook it off and went on to have a great day. I actually laughed with others about what she said several times. I thought it was ironic in light of the fact that I was working the day before this on the chapters in the book on rejection.

I also thought about how I handled the situation compared to how I would have handled it twenty years ago. Back when I still had a root of rejection I would have wanted to know who said bad things and exactly what they said. Then I would have defended myself and probably been upset for days over the thought that people are saying bad things about me. I am so glad I didn’t have to wear myself out emotionally with being upset over what some people think. I choose to believe that the people who like me outnumber the ones who don’t, so I will focus on the positive and stay happy. You can choose to do the same thing any time you encounter a similar situation.

When I say “do you need a fix,” I am not talking about drugs. I am talking about a fresh fix of strokes from people making you feel important just to get through every day. When we don’t know our value in God, we look to other people to make us feel valuable; however, they don’t always know what we need, and even if they did, they might not know how to give it to us.

Now that I see clearly, I realize that the majority of Dave’s and my problems in the early years of our marriage were due to the difference in our personalities, or to my having expectations that he didn’t realize I had. In marriage we seem to want our spouses to be mind readers and always know what we want, but they don’t. How often do you get hurt because you assume someone has enough common sense to know what you want, but that person doesn’t? If we fear rejection we may be reluctant to state our need clearly. We may drop a hint, but we don’t want to clearly tell someone what we need just in case that person rejects us.

I shed many tears over the years because Dave was going to play golf and I “expected” him to stay home and pay attention to me, or to ask me what I wanted to do that day. I wouldn’t ask him to stay home and do something with me, but instead I wanted him to “want” to, or to know that he should. I wanted him to sacrifice his desires for me so I would feel loved and valuable.

One day after crying most of the day and being completely miserable I finally thought, “This is stupid I know Dave loves me and that he would never hurt me intentionally, so why do I feel so
utterly crushed?” The answer was that I was still reacting to the root of rejection. I still didn’t know God’s love deeply enough to make me know my value, so I needed a “fix” from Dave. Sadly, I needed one almost daily, and that pressured him.

I am asking you to be very honest with yourself and try to see clearly regarding any difficulty you may have in relationships. Are they connected to the way you feel about yourself? And if so, is it really fair to ask someone else to keep you fixed all the time? I believe we must take responsibility for our own happiness, because nobody else can keep us happy all the time, and they shouldn’t have to.

How often have you said to someone, “You hurt my feelings,” and had that person reply, “I wasn’t trying to hurt your feelings”? It used to happen between Dave and me on a regular basis. I will relate two personal examples that I shared in my book
The Root of Rejection.

Dave and I were playing golf together and he was having a really rough day. If you know anything about golf, you know that a person can be a really good golfer and still have days when he cannot seem to do anything right. Dave was having one of those days. As I have a mothering instinct, I felt really sorry for him, and while riding down the fairway in the golf cart, I patted him on the back and said, “You’ll get a breakthrough and everything will be fine!” He responded, “Don’t feel sorry for me; this is good for me! You just wait and see, when I come through this, I will play better than ever before!” When Dave wouldn’t receive my comfort I was once again crushed. I literally felt as if I had collapsed on the inside. I thought, “You are so pigheaded! You
never need anyone to comfort you. Why couldn’t you have appreciated my comfort?” Still hurt and seething inside with anger, I was driving home in silence when the Lord whispered in my heart, “Joyce, you are trying to give Dave what you would need in this situation, and he doesn’t need that, so he didn’t receive it.” I realized that I felt rejected because I expected him to need what I needed, and he didn’t. His personality is different from mine and he didn’t have a root of rejection in his life.

Another lesson for me occurred while Dave and I were at the post office. Dave had come out of the post office, and I started to tell him something that was important to me. I was into my story and noticed that Dave wasn’t paying attention to me. He said, “Look at that man coming out of the post office! His shirt is ripped all the way down the back!”

I said, “Dave, I am trying to talk to you about something important.” And he said, “Well, I just wanted you to look at the man’s shirt.” I felt he was more interested in the man’s ripped shirt than he was in me, and once again I felt the crushing pain of what I viewed as rejection. The entire episode was a simple difference in our personalities and had nothing at all to do with Dave rejecting me. He is a “watcher,” and I am a “doer.” Dave loves to watch things and people, and he notices all the details. I wasn’t interested in the man or his ripped shirt, I was only interested in reaching my goal, and that was telling Dave what I wanted to tell him.