Living Courageously: You Can Face Anything, Just Do It Afraid (11 page)

I am sure you have heard the phrase, “You can let go of someone, and if they were ever truly yours, they will come back.” Sometimes people need some time and space to grow and mature before they are safe friends for us. If you find that you cannot be friends with someone, continue praying for them and never hold any bitterness in your heart toward them. Perhaps someday the relationship can be restored, but always remember that you must have boundaries in your life or you will be taken advantage of.

You can be free from the fear of not being in control if you will learn to trust God to be in control. He has an amazing life for you, so be sure that you live it fully. He has a good plan for you and the right people for you to be in relationships with, and I urge you to open your heart to Him fully in these matters. Don’t miss your life by letting other people control you, and don’t try to control them. All you can do is live your life and let them live theirs.

Release all the people in your life to God because, in reality, they belong to Him anyway. When you release them to His loving care, it releases you to enjoy your life. Give them to Him and trust His long-range plan. You may even have to watch people that you love go through some pain that you would love to help them avoid, but sometimes we have to let people make their own mistakes and learn from them.

Let them live their life even if they don’t live it the way you would like for them to. Keep praying and remember that God can do more in one second than you can do in a lifetime.

This would be a good time to pray and—one by one—let go of anyone you are trying to control. Even if your intentions are good, you still need to let them go and trust God to do what needs to be done in their life.

Being abused sexually, verbally, mentally, and emotionally as a child and teenager definitely left me afraid that no one would want me as an adult. Fear permeated the very atmosphere that I grew up in. I was afraid that someone, especially my mother, would find out what my dad was doing to me. I was simultaneously afraid that no one would ever find out and I would never be rescued. I was afraid that if they did find out they would blame me, and there was always the nagging fear that maybe the abuse was my fault. Perhaps there was something wrong with me!

I was afraid of my father’s intimidation and anger. I was afraid that I might make him angry, and yet when he was angry I couldn’t figure out what I did wrong. I was afraid to ask him for anything, not even a dime to get a Popsicle. Wanting things wasn’t very popular in our home, so usually I just didn’t ask because of fear of making my dad angry. I felt I had to take care of myself and not need very much; but I was only a little girl, and I was afraid I couldn’t or didn’t know how to do that. I felt a crushing sense of responsibility. I thought I needed to fix everything, but I was very afraid because I didn’t know how to do it.

My fears changed as I became an adult, but they were still present. I had the fear of failure, the fear of letting friends into my life—especially close friends—and the fear of being taken advantage of. There were many fears, both big and small, but the one we will deal with in this chapter was a big one for me.

I longed for the day I could leave home and be on my own, away from the abuse I was suffering, and yet I also lived with the fear that I would be alone and unwanted because I felt like damaged merchandise! The fear of not being wanted is experienced by thousands of people, and it fills us with a sadness that can only be known by one who has felt it. We are created for healthy connections, and there is always a part of us that craves it. We want to be loved! We want to be wanted!

My thoughts were,
What man could love and want to marry someone who has been used by their father the way I have been?
This became a fear in my life that eventually caused me to make a mistake and marry the first young man who seemed to have an interest in me. I did not feel peaceful about the union, but the fear of never having anyone and being alone and unwanted caused me to override wisdom and marry him anyway. Our five-year marriage was filled with more pain, rejection, abandonment, and betrayal. Exactly what I did not need after growing up the way I did. The marriage ended in divorce due to infidelity on his part. I existed under layers of pain that caused a great many problems in my life until I finally received the love and acceptance of Jesus and healing for my wounded soul.

In the last year of the marriage, I got pregnant, and while I was carrying his baby he left me and lived with another woman who happened to reside just two blocks from where he and I lived.
Each day, when I drove to work, I drove by the apartment where they were living together and I vividly recall the painful feelings of being unwanted and rejected. Like most people do, I thought something was wrong with me and that I wasn’t good enough, otherwise he would not have left me for someone else. She probably wore a size 4 or 6, and she had long blond hair and blue eyes. I had never in my life worn a size 4 and I had ordinary brown hair and brown eyes. As I compared myself with her, I definitely felt lacking in most areas.

The more flaws we see in ourselves, the more we accept rejection as something we deserve. We begin to internalize it and believe there is something wrong with us that caused the rejection. Like most people in a similar situation, my emotional pain was so intense that I could not think rationally or realize that my husband had many problems and wrong behavior patterns that were not connected to me or anything I was, or anything I was not doing. He was that way when I married him, but I was so desperate and fearful of being unwanted that I refused to be honest with myself about him. I believe that literally thousands upon thousands of women and men make this same mistake. The fear of being alone and unwanted is intense and can motivate us to make unwise relationship decisions.

I am sure you can imagine the emotional pain I felt while driving past the apartment—where he was living with another woman—pregnant with his child, going to work to pay the bills that he created and walked away from.

My pregnancy was a terribly lonely time. I couldn’t receive any comfort from my parents, and I had no real friends. I was totally dependent upon being able to take care of myself and very fearful about how I was going to do that as I reached the end of my pregnancy. When I could no longer work, I had no money and
no place to turn to for help, so the woman who fixed my hair at the beauty shop where I went invited me to live with her and her mom until after I had the baby.

My soul was scarred from fear, abuse, and rejection, and at that time I did not know that God loved me, would never reject me, and actually wanted to restore my soul and make me whole again (see Psalm 23). If you can relate to how I felt during that time, I urge you to believe that God also wants to restore your life and make it something amazingly wonderful. He is knocking on the door of your heart, and all you need to do is say, “Jesus, come in.” God’s healing in our lives is not an instantaneous thing; it is a process, but it is definitely available to all who will receive it by faith.

Even if you are afraid to let anyone else into your life right now, you can begin by letting Jesus in, and He will enable you to eventually let others in also. You can enjoy healthy and safe relationships!

After I gave birth to my son alone in a clinic, my husband did show up and took me to live with him at his aunt’s house. That only lasted a few short weeks and he was gone again on another escapade with a different woman. I finally found the courage to divorce him, but my circumstances only worsened because I finally had no choice except to go back to my father’s house and try to avoid his sexual advances. I lived there for a few months with my son. I worked during the day while my son stayed with a neighborhood babysitter, and I was miserable all the time. Day and night I was haunted with fear and the pain of being lonely, rejected, and unwanted. I felt stuck in a place that I hated and saw no means of escape.

I had received Jesus as my Savior at the age of nine while visiting relatives, but I had no understanding of what was available to me through my relationship with Christ, so I kept all of my problems even though I had Jesus. I was like a millionaire, spiritually speaking, who never went to the bank to cash a check because I didn’t know what I had. However, I did pray what I am sure sounded like pathetic prayers, but God heard me. I asked that one day God would send someone to truly love me and take me to church, and eventually Dave Meyer pulled up in front of my parents’ house where I was washing my mother’s car and the rest is history. It is a story for another time, but he definitely was the answer to the prayers I had prayed in the midst of my pain.

No matter how bad you are hurting, I urge you to pray! Pour your heart out to God and don’t worry about sounding eloquent. Tell Him how you feel and be patient as He works in your life. I admit that it is difficult to be patient when you’re hurting, but God will comfort you as you remain steadfast in your faith.

I recently met a woman who expressed her gratitude for our television program. She said the Word of God that she received from it brought healing to her family. She went on to tell me that her son had developed a serious eating disorder that had required hospitalization. I asked if he had been insecure, and she said that he was in a band and began to admire the lead singer and compare himself to him. For no apparent reason he became afraid that the time might come when they would not want him in the band, and although he was not overweight at all and very handsome, he decided he should be as thin as the lead singer. He started down the path of eating and then forcing himself to
vomit, so he did not retain the calories in the food. This eating disorder has some serious side effects if it is practiced over a long period of time, and it did have devastating effects on him. The stress from his problems ended up causing his mother to have a post-traumatic nerve disorder, and she needed counseling and medical help. All of these problems began with a young man’s fear of being unwanted and rejected. It wasn’t even a reality, just a fear! Although he didn’t know how to at the time, all he would have had to do was resist the fear in the very beginning and he could have avoided all the pain he had personally, as well as the pain caused to his family. Fear is indeed a formidable enemy and one that we must learn to confront.

We were designed and created by God for acceptance and not for rejection. Because it is an inherent need in us, we crave it, and we need to live in an atmosphere of acceptance in order to grow and make progress. What if we are rejected and unwanted by the people in our lives? Although it is painful, we can still choose to receive God’s acceptance and know that we are alive because He wants us.
God wants you!
God is the giver of life, and He has created each of us carefully and purposely. No matter who rejects us, God accepts us. And that is enough to enable us to be successful in life. Jesus was rejected and despised, but He focused on God’s love for Him. We should focus on God’s acceptance rather than people’s rejection. What we focus on becomes the largest thing in our life.

Jesus came to help people, yet they hated Him without a cause. Was it painful to Him? I imagine it was because He had emotions just as we do. But He did not let the rejection derail Him from the purpose for which He was sent. Satan launches attacks of rejection against us in the hope that the pain of it will weaken us to the point that we will give up, isolate ourselves, and be so afraid of being unwanted that we end up emotionally crippled and unable to maintain healthy relationships or be successful in life. However, knowledge is power, and when we understand what Satan is trying to do and why, then we can more aggressively resist him and have victory instead of being the victim.

We can trust God to give us the acceptance that we crave instead of compromising our values and making unwise choices in order to get it. I have experienced what seems like more than my fair share of rejection in my life: in my childhood from people I trusted and loved, and later as a woman being used by God in ministry. Some of my most intense pain has come from those rejections, but I have recovered by applying the very same principles that I am sharing with you.

God has already provided the total acceptance we crave, and all we need to do is receive it by faith. Are you afraid to believe it might be true? I know that I was for a long, long time. I thought,
What if I believe that God loves me and I am only deceiving myself? What if I believe I am totally accepted by God and it is really just my imagination?
It almost seemed too good to really be true. But we
find our proof in God’s Word. Even after we decide to believe we are accepted and wanted by God, our feelings don’t always agree. We must learn to believe what God says more than we believe how we feel.

We are made acceptable to God through Christ (see Ephesians 2:6). God doesn’t love us because we deserve it, but because He is kind and gracious and wants to love us (see Ephesians 2:4–5). The craving we feel for acceptance can be truly met only in Jesus. He doesn’t give it only when we are good and withdraw it when we are not. God accepts us because we believe in His Son Jesus Christ, and not because of what we do or don’t do (see John 3:18). You are loved, accepted, and wanted!

We have been chosen by God, picked out as His own in Christ before the foundation of the world (see Ephesians 1:4). Before we had an opportunity to do anything right or wrong, God decided that He wanted us! I want to encourage you to really think about that and not just merely read over it. You have been chosen by God!

I wrote the following in my
Everyday Life
study Bible on page 1,929: