Rejection has hurt me in so many ways by so many people. When I feel rejection it makes me clam up, and makes me want to hide from everybody. It makes me want to not be vulnerable with anybody anymore. It makes me hate relationships. It brings sadness.
Being in a relationship with someone, anyone, takes hard work. It takes sacrifice. It takes vulnerability, but most importantly it takes love. Love is a term that we throw out there very loosely. I love to eat, I love to be around people, I love pretty flowers...etc. You get what I mean. Love can be self-seeking, it can be friendship love, but the one God calls us to is agape love. Agape always flows from what is right and best. Agape is not as much a feeling as a response. Agape is not fueled by the desire of its recipient; it is fueled by the need(all cited again in Beth Moore's study) God commands us to an agape love.
So my prayer today is that I learn to love without abandon in everything. I pray that rejection is something of my past that won't stop me from being vulnerable with people. I want to learn to love people as God does. So as I close I will just leave you with a passage.
I Corinthians 13
1 If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. 3 If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it;[a] but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.
4 Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud 5 or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. 6 It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. 7 Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.
8 Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages[b] and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever! 9 Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! 10 But when full understanding comes, these partial things will become useless.
11 When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. 12 Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity.[c] All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.
13 Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.
