Resolving Resignation and Rejection

The closest thing to the heart is acceptance – finding a place on the earth the soul calls home. And we will strive for our way there. Our instincts are unrelenting.

Loneliness, disappointment, betrayal, chastening, anxiety, depression, grief (of sorts) and a myriad of other disorders of the soul are warranted for rejection.

Rejection is a feeling. It’s innately and intensely personal.

Not far from rejection is the close cousin, resignation... this is an accepted variety of helpless hopelessness. It’s a few down the road from rejection—sadly, it expects nothing less.

It’s painful even reading about these two.

Acknowledging and Moving On

We will all feel rejected. Never do we really get completely over it, no matter how ‘mature’ we get. People are perhaps on the other end of these feelings of ours, but at the end of the day they’re still our feelings.

So, if we accept we’ll feel rejected it can help us understand that not always does this correlate with actual rejection—many times the person or situation we feel we’ve been rejected by is completely unaware of it. Like unforgiveness there’s little sense to retaining our feelings of rejection.

Resignation is even more insidious. We hardly even notice that we’ll almost expect rejection in certain situations—particularly those we’ve been hurt in before. Off goes the triggering event and we’re right back there in a flash.

Acknowledgement is so powerful. It is genuinely the first step in truly moving on.

Flipping the Coin

Could it be that the first time we feel ultimately empowered over our rejection is when we understand—and no less, see—others’ rejection, particularly as it occurs, us rejecting people? Yes, that’s a different angle isn’t it?

We’ll hardly ever contemplate how the other person feels at the hand of our rejection. And suddenly when we do this we’re quickly empathetic.

Like we address any spiritual problem, we really need to focus on other people and not so much on ourselves. God has this way about life that the less we think of ourselves and our problems the less we’ll worry about them. Sounds almost too simple doesn’t it?

The only disclaimer to the focus on others is our honesty with ourselves. It is too easy to reject (deny) our (feelings of) rejection, never doing anything about them.

Love Makes the World Go Around

Acceptance and rejection lead us inevitably to love.

Love is what we all pine for and we need it every day, in all manner of forms; we’re never ‘cured’ of love.

Given this knowledge, and how keenly rejection hurts us, the key question is, “Are we prepared to be others’ security by loving in advance?”

Somehow when we do this God’s love comes in and gives us surety beyond what any human could give. Rejection’s power is transformed, crushed.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.