[rejection] OUCH!

ooooohh the dreaded whisper in your ear, "they don't like you anymore".

As far back as I can remember, I have wanted to be liked.
In the middle of my first grade, we moved to another state. I never made a single friend in that school. That summer we moved again to another city. I was bigger than the other kids and felt terribly awkward.  For some inexplicable reason, the cutest, most popular girl in class befriended me. I learned the importance of being included by the right person, the value gained from being with the cool kid.
Things got worse. In the 5th grade, some boy saw the black hair on my arms and called me an ape. Then there was the pink elephant nickname I got in 6th grade due to my favorite pair of pink polyester pants. I learned not to feel secure in how I felt about myself. The perception of others could change everything, and I was positively sure that it mattered.
I could make good grades though, so when we moved to Louisiana in 7th grade, my new best friend was not only the smartest girl in the class but also the prettiest. Again, I gained value and security in my friendship, but I was never fully able to trust that it would last. By then I was convinced that everyone would reject me, eventually. I sought after friends because they were my biggest source of self-worth, but they were also my biggest threat of rejection. Does it sound like I used people? Well, it's true, that is exactly what I did.
Do you fear rejection? Do people threaten you? Do you use people?
We instinctively look to others to infuse value into our insecure little beings. We build cisterns that won't hold water, all the while feeling sorry for ourselves because we can never seem to keep the cistern full.

Through Jeremiah the prophet, the Lord told the people "you have committed two evils, you have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn out cisterns for yourselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water." Jeremiah 2:13

How ironic that we are so absorbed with fear of rejection from others, so busy seeking to be filled with things or people outside of Christ, that we never give thought to the fact that we are rejecting Him.

This obsession with our own value isn't just irony, or folly, or even insanity, it is pure evil!