24 February 2010
He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Isaiah 53:3
How do you handle rejection? It’s part of life, you know. Whether you ask someone to marry you and the answer is “No!” or you are a writer who sends his manuscript to publisher after publisher and gets turned down, or you go from one job interview to the next, always hoping for a job only to get the “Don’t call us; we’ll call you” routine, or you talk to your neighbor about your faith, and he tells you to get lost, everyone faces rejection.
“Don’t take it personal!” people say. But how else can you take it? You are the one who got the polite “boiler-plated” impersonal letter from the publisher, which you really interpreted as saying, “Sorry—buddy, but we didn’t like your book.”
You were the one who got the brush-off by that beautiful girl who led you to believe that she thought you were as special and wonderful as you did her. “You can’t be serious about this,” she told you. You were serious. You were never more serious in all your life, and that’s why the pain of rejection is tearing you apart.
OK, how do you handle rejection when the pain goes as deep as your bones? Some folks cannot. Flat outright, they just can’t cope with rejection. They are the ones you read about in the newspaper, who, for whatever reason, end their lives. I’ve been involved in some of those situations, and though the papers never told readers why, the bottom line is rejection—by a lover, a husband or a wife, a prospective employer, or a friend. They felt excluded, pushed away by life.
Others drink, trying to drown their loneliness and pain, but more than a few withdraw. They are the ones who crawl into a cave of isolation and vow never to put themselves in a position where they can be rejected again.
If you are among those suffering the pain of rejection—and who isn’t there at some time or another?—you must strive to remember that everyone, on occasion, faces rejection. And your person may have nothing to do with rejection. When I first began writing and would get a rejection letter from a publisher, I was decimated. “Not good enough!” I would tell myself. Grace Livingstone Hill was turned down by more than 40 publishers before her first manuscript saw printer’s ink. The fact that you get turned down—as writers eventually learn—may not be because what you have written is not good. If the publisher has a similar book in his warehouse he wants to sell, there is no way he will touch yours.
Jesus also suffered rejection and He knows your feelings of pain. “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering” wrote Isaiah. John adds, “He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him” (John 1:11).
The fact is that rejection may be a reflection of your true worth and value in a society that doesn’t value much of anything. What you have to overcome may be a greater measurement of your success than what you finally do.
I never met the man who tried to witness to Anacleto Lacanilao. He was rejected eleven times. Every time the missionary tried to talk to his friend he got the cold shoulder. Finally, he was told, “If you talk to me one more time, I’m going to kill you.” But he came back the twelfth time. Anacleto thought, “If he is willing to face my threat of killing him, I had better listen to him.
It’s OK to bring your feelings of despondency to the Lord. He’s a specialist in rejection. Remember the stone that the builders rejected became the cornerstone? Never, never, never punish yourself when you know what you are doing is right.
Resource reading: 1 Peter 2