I am not writing about rejection from a position of objective aloofness. I have had to wrestle personally with processing rejection from other Christians, and have also had to face the pain of realizing that many others have felt rejected by me. When God began to teach me about rejection, He did it through both means -- through allowing me to feel rejected, and through allowing me to cause others to feel rejected through my imperfect attempts to relate to them.
When I consider those from who I have felt rejection, I can't think of a single one who purposefully intended to hurt me. And when I think of those who have felt rejected by me, I can't think of a single person what I meant to hurt. I was not malicious toward them, they were not malicious toward me. We weren't trying to hurt each other, in fact our intentions were to love one another. But rejection just seemed to happen anyways.
Sometimes we are rejected by others. And sometimes we feel rejected when in fact we were being accepted. Either way, the feelings of rejection are the result of our broken humanity, our falleness, our ineptitude at relating to one another in the perfection of Christ. Furthermore, it's possible to relate to someone absolutely perfectly - as Jesus related to the Pharisees - and have them feel rejected by you.
I began to awaken to the reality that a growing number of people in my sphere of influence have felt rejected by me. When I began to count them, I became alarmed at how large the list was! I can't think of a single instance when I meant to reject any of them; in some cases I knew I would be interpreted as rejecting them; in other cases I was taken by surprise at their responses. In fact, I've known the frustrating syndrome of sincerely thinking that I was expressing particular acceptance and affirmation toward someone, only to discover later that they received my words as rejection.
I have also tasted a little bit of what the apostle Paul wrote about when He told the believers at Corinth, "And I will very gladly spend and be spent for your souls; though the more abundantly I love you, the less I am loved." (2 Cor. 12:15) Paul loved the Corinthians so much that he was willing to hazard their affection in order to minister loving correction and rebuke. He extended genuine love to them, but they interpreted his love as rejection...
In our better moments, with the best of intentions, we can still cause others to feel rejected by us. As long as we're on this earth, rejection will always be one of the foremost issues involved in the dynamics of out interpersonal relationships.
We've all know rejection in the past... It's inevitable; we are guaranteed to feel rejection again. Thus, how we deal with rejection becomes an ever-present issue which we must face honestly...
Rejection affects us more profoundly than we care to admit. We can convince ourselves that we have not been wounded by someone's rejection, but then we begin to realize we have constructed self-projecting mechanisms to insulate ourselves from reoccurrence of that kind of injury. The protective walls we build around our souls are the evidence that the rejection has wounded us more than we thought. Consequently, our relationships with others suffer. We have distanced ourselves from others because of our past pains, and now struggle to find full satisfaction in the relationships God has given us. Rejection has left its scar.
It's tempting to respond to rejection with an inner vow, "That's the last time I'll let anyone else hurt me like that." We think we are protecting ourselves from further rejection, but instead we're trapping ourselves in a pattern of behavior that only binds us to the bitterness of the past. When we serve that need to stay protected, we relate to others in a way that only serves to escalate the volume of rejection we continue to encounter from them.
Once we've been really wounded by rejection, relationships become a great risk. We calculate, "Are the potential benefits of this relationship worth risking the potential hurts of this relationship?" so we decide how much of our soul we will open to this person. New relationships can be seen as a gamble.
"The heart knows its own bitterness" Prov. 14:10 No one but you knows the depths of your heartache. You have known the bitterness of rejection, the depths of which no other human being fully understands. You have carried the wounds of private pain, suffering in a way know to God alone....
[but] No one understands rejection better than Jesus.
~excerpts from DEALING WITH THE PRAISE AND REJECTION OF MAN from pp. 3-7 by Bob Sorge
I've just started the book, so there will be more to come, if you're interested...
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