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May 23 - July 31, 2024
Finally, I see that honesty isn’t trying to hurt me. It’s trying to heal me.
“Not in my presence will you talk about yourself this way. Absolutely not.”
Negative self-talk was a rejection from my past that I had allowed to settle into the core of who I am.
Rejection steals the best of who I am by reinforcing the worst of what’s been said to me.
Broken boards can’t provide stability. There was nothing profound about that from a construction standpoint. Except seeing those boards barely hanging on was like looking inside myself. For years, I’d been expecting stability from a broken identity.
In my research on rejection, I discovered two core fears that feed a person’s sensitivity to rejection: The fear of being abandoned The fear of losing one’s identity
When a man is physically present but emotionally absent, a girl’s heart can feel quite hollow and helpless.
Things of this world all eventually reveal what incapable anchors they really are.
But feelings are fragile props. As are ditches that can’t really hide you and daddies who won’t stay.
The beliefs we hold should hold us up even when life feels like it’s falling apart.
My identity must be anchored to the truth of who God is and who He is to me. Only then can I find a stability beyond what my feelings will ever allow. The closer I align my truth with His truth, the more closely I identify with God—and the more my identity really is in Him.
The exhausting manipulation and control it takes to protect an identity based on circumstances will crush our hearts and hide the best of who we are behind a wall of insecurity.
“I’m Yours, God. I’m not who that guy says I am. I’m not who that girl says I am. I’m not who social media likes and comments say I am. I’m not who the grades, to-do lists, messes, and mess ups say I am. I’m not who the scale says I am or the sum total of what my flaws say I am. I’m going to stop flirting with the unstable things of this world so I can fall completely in love with You. I am loved. I am held. I am Yours. I am forever Yours.”
Though we may get our hearts broken from the effects of sin in this in-between time, God’s goodness will eventually set the world right. In the meantime, we must hold fast to the truth of who God is and His unchanging nature: God is good. His plans are good. His requirements are good. His salvation is good. His grace is good. His forgiveness is good. His restoration is good. That is what I believe about God. God is good.
The mind feasts on what it focuses on. What consumes my thinking will be the making or the breaking of my identity.
God is good. God is good to me. God is good at being God. And today is yet another page in our great love story.
Live from the abundant place that you are loved, and you won’t find yourself begging others for scraps of love.
The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing. (ZEPHANIAH 3:17 ESV)
That’s not the answer. Giving with strings of secret expectations attached is the greatest invitation to heartbreak. That’s not love. That’s manipulation. And it’s all so unrealistic. Only audiences are trained to applaud performances. People in everyday life can sniff out the neediness of a performer trying to earn love. Their instinct isn’t to clap but rather to be repulsed by the fakeness of it all and walk away.
Living loved is sourced in your quiet daily surrender to the One who made you.
How dangerous it is when our souls are gasping for God but we’re too distracted flirting with the world to notice. Flirting will give you brief surges of fun feelings but will never really pull you in and hold you close.
We run at a breakneck pace to try and achieve what God simply wants us to slow down enough to receive.
We just have to turn to Him. And sit with Him. No matter what. Even if our toes are bloody from the constant wear and tear of desperately running to Him. Get to Him daily. How it must break His heart when we walk around so desperate for a love He waits to give us each and every day.
Jesus doesn’t participate in the rat race. He’s into the slower rhythms of life, like abiding, delighting, and dwelling—all words that require us to trust Him with our place and our pace. Words used to describe us being with Him.
When we abide, delight, and dwell in Him, He then places within us desires that line up with His best desire for us. Therefore, He can give us whatever we ask, because we will only want what’s consistent with His best. He can fully satisfy our hearts, because they are consistent with His heart.
No, God’s love isn’t based on me. It’s simply placed on me. And it’s the place from which I should live … loved.
Proximity and activity don’t always equal connectivity.
We must respect ourselves enough to break the pattern of placing unrealistic expectations on others. After all, people will not respect us more than we respect ourselves.
Here’s the secret shift we must make: Do I walk into situations prepared with the fullness of God in me, free to look for ways to bless others? Or … Do I walk into situations empty and dependent on others to look for ways to bless me?
The more we fill ourselves from His life-giving love, the less we will be dictated by the grabby-ness of the flesh.
At the core of who we are, we crave the acceptance that comes from being loved. To satisfy this longing we will either be graspers of God’s love or grabbers for people’s love. If we grasp the full love of Christ, we won’t grab at other things to fill us. Or if we do, we’ll sense it.
Yes, the concept of telling our flesh no can sound so good on paper, but in the midst of rejection’s painful pricks, we can often feel so very powerless. That’s where we have to know we aren’t expected to just put on a brave face and hope for the best. We have the power through Christ, who is over every power, including the pull of the flesh and the sting of rejection. When we have Christ, we are full—fully loved and accepted and empowered to say no.
But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely. Legalism is helpless in bringing this about; it only gets in the way. Among those who belong to Christ, everything
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The more fully we invite God in, the less we will feel uninvited by others.
What we see will violate what we know unless what we know dictates what we see.
The LORD is my shepherd, I lack nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.
Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever. (PSALM 23:6)
That word follow in the original Hebrew is radaph, meaning “to pursue” or “chase.” God’s goodness and love will run after us all the days of our lives.
People who care more about being right than ending right prove just how wrong they were all along.
“Bitterness, resentment, and anger have no place in a heart as beautiful as yours.” I say it, because I need to hear it too.
And it’s not just the thing taken that haunts us. It’s the reality that humans can be vicious and selfish and cruel. That’s what rejection does. Rejection steals the security of all we thought was beautiful and stable and leaves us scared and fragile and more vulnerable than ever.
But God. He’s there. The One whom I proclaimed is good. Good to me. Good at being God. The One with whom I am living a love story. And I know I can’t continue to fully embrace God while rejecting His ways.
To love God is to cooperate with His grace.
Relationships don’t come in packages of perfection; relationships come in packages of potential.
Acceptance is like an antibiotic that prevents past rejections from turning into present-day infections.
No amount of outside achievement fixes inside hurts. Those hurts have to be soothed by replacing the lies with truth.
Let your past rejection experiences work for you instead of against you by allowing them to help you sense the possible pain behind other people’s reactions. Try to see things from their vantage points and think of how they might be hurting in this situation. Even if you don’t agree with their stance or their reaction, find a way to identify with their hurt. Most people are walking around with way more hurts from their past than we can ever imagine. Pretty much everyone has at some point been deeply hurt by someone. That’s your “me too.”
Then make a list of good things you know to be true about that person like I did in chapter 6. This doesn’t validate her actions in the moment, but it will validate her worth as a person. Even if you are clueless about the past hurts that could be feeding her reaction, you can still be sensitive to her obvious pain. You will be an agent of grace in her life as you whisper, “You do belong.”
