I found it to not be lonely, but exciting, Jesus was my date, He was my companion and there is no one better to spend time with. I found Jesus could go anywhere and everywhere with me. I could bake cookies with Him, go shopping with Him and just do everyday, ordinary things with Him.

What I learned most by looking at my past rejections was there was one early on that to me was huge and it colored my thinking and every decision I made for years. I didn’t even realize it was the source of my shame or the cause of my bad decisions and poor perception of myself. It was huge and happened to me when I was in my early 20’s and it took until my 40’s to figure it out, over 20 years!

Rejection and the shame that sometimes accompanies it, the vacancy that always accompanies it is not something we can ignore.

Run to Jesus with it…RUN! He can heal you everywhere you hurt.


July 23, 2006
 

I’m doing a Beth Moore Bible Study with my husband. We watch a teaching from her for about an hour on line and then do a workbook for 5 days. The study is on the Fruit of the Spirit. The first fruit we studied was love. It’s funny, because our church is doing a sermon series on the Holy Spirit and just when we started this bible study, the sermon series moved from the Gifts of the Spirit to the Fruit of the Spirit; funny how God works.

During the message on love, Beth spoke about rejection. We have all been rejected at some point in our life and rejection makes us react. Either we put up walls and decide we are not going to love that deeply again, not be that vulnerable again or expose our real self to anyone -- after all that’s how we get hurt. Our hurt goes as deep as our love did and we think if we love little, we will hurt little, that’s how we rationalize it to ourselves. Yet, if we love little, do we really love?

The word rejected is chadel in Hebrew; Strong’s dictionary shows the word “vacant” in the definition. Vacant is a word that surprised me. Beth Moore talked about this vacancy as being something we experience when we are rejected by someone we love. This rejection leaves a vacancy in our soul and in our lives. We want to fill this vacancy with something or someone. There are times we fill this vacancy with drugs, alcohol, shopping, gambling or other people; we jump right into another relationship which turns out to be destructive.
 

Looking back, I find that most of my bad decisions in life were made from the place of a vacancy caused by rejection. I have most often jumped into another relationship to fill this hole in me instead of going to God to fill it. After all, God is the only one who really can fill this emptiness in me and heal me, He is all I need. I have done things that I didn’t believe in and I have been a person that I’m really not, just to keep someone in my life, I was so afraid of being alone. I would let the other person dictate who and what I was. I did this in relationships I wasn’t even happy in with people I know now I really didn’t love. But, I thought I loved them and I thought the reason I wasn’t happy is because they were not keeping me or making me happy. I realize now that people cannot make or keep me happy and I cannot make or keep someone else happy. My happiness must come from within…from God.

The first thing I noticed when I gave my life to Christ at 34 years old, was I could be alone, and be OK. I lived alone then and previously when I had lived alone, I was anxious to go someplace or to have people over. I would even pay for people to go places with me. I was desperate. Then, when I gave my life to Christ, I was delivered from this. I stayed home alone most nights and I was OK, I practiced being alone; I went out to dinner, I went to David Copperfield when he was in town, I went on vacation for a long weekend and even went to St Louis, MO for a Joyce Meyer conference, all of this, I did alone.