דחייה

Ezekiel 16:6

Then I passed by and saw you kicking about in your blood, and as you lay there in your blood I said to you, "Live!" 

Greetings and glad tidings to you all! Listen, I want to share a silver lining with you guys from a portion of last week's post about correction. If you didn't read it, don't go any further from here. Please go check it out really quick then come right back.  

Anyway, so I shared what I will call it, some TRIGGER TRANSPARENCY. The type of transparent moment that unearths triggers in me that are either unknown or known. 
This was an alien trigger in this sense. 

The account involved me laying hands on a young lady who it was revealed to me through Holy Spirit that she was pregnant and contemplating having an abortion. Also, how I was subsequently corrected because of this in a manner that would break me. 

I'm elated to share with you guys that I would find out some time later that the girl was indeed pregnant and that she would choose to keep her child, a boy. 

I was actually able to meet this little man child at about a month or so of age. 
I was able to hold him and to love on him. He's a couple years old now. 
And guess what? He's a big brother! 

Everytime I see his mother post pictures of him and his brother, my heart bursts with joy. 
If I had to go back and do that night all over again, I would. 

Thanks to one of the associate pastors, Dr. Pam Ross at my current home of worship, for eloquently speaking on the subject of submission and reminding us that what the devil intended for evil, God turns it around for our good. 

Had I not received that message, I don't believe I would have ever saw this;
 A part of me in my submission to some improper correction–-died, 
so that a little king could live.  
#Shooketh


Man, I'm messed up but in a good way about this. I regret nothing. 
Well alright! 
Blow your nose and dry your eyes my beautiful people. 
Let's move it right along shall we?

I know you might be wondering what are those little foreign symbols in the title. 
They're deliberate. I haven't lost my mind. Ha! 
If you've guessed that those symbols are Hebrew, you smart! 
(In my DJ Khalid voice) 
If you took it upon yourself to find the translation, then you my friends have become this blog's real MVPs. 
Yit-ta-deeeeee! 

If you didn't do either, that's ok. You've just entered into a crash course on how to follow an unpredictable creative such as I. 
 I'm a part of a very weird habitat of people that don't like coloring in the lines all the time. 
So yeah, here you go,

Rejection has some core effects and affects that can be readily noticed across the board in a people. 

However, depending on a myriad of other circumstances (upbringing, relationship experiences etc.) an individual's most prominent response may vary. 

In the past, when I'd be confronted with rejection, my initial response would be to shut down, go into isolation, and self loathe. This is the place where I would force feed myself the ideas that I was not good enough, not strong enough, not smart enough, not creative enough, not successful enough, not pretty enough, and all that hogwash. 

The next phase would then look like me saying YES to almost everything. Piling my plate with ministry activities, sometimes not even realizing I was being taken advantage of. 

I had no boundaries the first!

 It wasn't until I lost pretty much my whole life's work in 2015, that God had to bring me face to face with the aftermath of my rejection. 

He allowed me to complete my commitments from 2015 to 2016. After that, He sat me down so that I could look at my reflection. I was able to see how I'd been engaging in an unremitting, "Look at me! Look what I can do," campaign. 

It was almost Pavlovian. As if I was classically conditioned to behave in this way. 

If I wasn't doing that, I was self sabotaging like a mug. 

I was still struggling with this part on up until recently though, to be honest. 

But by 2017 I was burned out, apathetic, disillusioned, and bitter. 

Rejection had invaded my spirit and reshaped my personality. 

What I have discovered is, no matter who you are in life you will not be able to avoid some form of rejection. You will either be rejected on purpose or rejected inadvertently. Doesn't matter, it will happen whether you meet the criteria of others or not. 

I came to this conclusion after I applied to be a police officer with the city of Chicago in 2017. 

My strong desire to be of service in a greater capacity led me to do so. 

I'd passed the written test, the polygraph test, overcame my fear of driving and acquired my driver's license, and passed the physical test. 

Yet, I was disqualified because my work history wasn't favorable since I'd been fired from one job and walked off another. I was bent out of shape for a minute that is until I was able to flip through all of my experiences with rejection and noticed, 

GOD WAS ACTUALLY PROTECTING ME.  

I know we've heard it often, that rejection is none other than protection. It literally is! It's not a slight to you unless you make it a slight to you. 

Because rejection is inevitable, try to adapt the habit of not going into a dark space of self pity but to accept that you're probably being protected from something. 

From what? 

Heaven only knows.

What you need to focus on is in what direction is your growth supposed to go. Once this becomes your primary focus, who overlooks you or rejects you won't bother you practically at all. You'll see it as a sign that you're growing in a direction that that closed door would not have been able to accommodate had it been opened. 

Consider rejection as a protagonist to your growth and not vice versa

Ezekial chapter 16 will more than likely be one of my favorite passages of scripture. I stumbled upon it when I was stung very bad by a situation. This scripture would give me so much solace. 

The chapter actually is a rebuke from God through the mouth of the prophet, Ezekial. 

God compared Jerusalem to an adulterous wife due to their ungodly practices and gross behaviors. 

#Yikes. 

He started off though, expressing how much tender loving care He put into His relationship with them. I encourage you to go read this chapter for yourself. The first few verses He really laid it on her (Jerusalem) with His compassion and loving kindness which is what led to verse 6 when He said, 

"Then I passed by and saw you kicking about in your blood, and as you lay there in your blood I said to you, “Live!” 

He talked about how he bathed her, allowed her to grow, and covered her nakedness but how she turned around and trusted her beauty and used her fame to become a prostitute. Inciting His jealous anger. Forcing Him to announce the type of consequences He would allow her to face in order to bring her back to Him. 

Weeeewww!

Please read this when you get a chance. It was critical. 

Revelation 2:4  
Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first.

What if I told you, that God will use rejection not just to foster your growth but also to pull you back closer to Him if where you're headed has the potential to turn you into a spiritual prostitute and/or spiritual adulterer? 

You see, God is a jealous God. Not like a human jealous though. 
More so, from a protective standpoint. 
It's not His desire for you to be out here loose!

You're precious to Him. You're sacred and valuable. You were not created to be exploited. He will allow you to be rejected by whatever has the probability to be your pimp or your god. 

Plain and simple. 

I can attest to this myself. 

The more the rejection hurts, the greater the chances that you'd made this thing your end all be all. Your means to an end. Your reliance. 

Sometimes rejection will mean that God has something better in store for you. 

Other times, it will be to induce repentance. 

#BOOP! 

Here we go with that word again. We all like to shout about how a closed door in one season means an open door in another season. 

Not too many are aware of how a closed door in one season can mean an altar to repent in the next. 

What's the point of God allowing you to be rejected in one setting to bless you with a greater opportunity in the next when your character wreaks of heaux tendencies? 

#Negative 

Rejection brings you low. An opportune time for God to turn you around. To take you off of this idolatrous spiritually promiscuous runway. 
I told you, you are precious to Him. You are valuable and sacred. He is madly in love with you. 

He has to do what He needs to do to get you back in His presence.
Even if it means breaking your heart. 
Now there are people, who's callings are ordained for rejection on a regular basis, similar to Jesus and the Biblical apostles and prophets. 

There are people who need to be redirected by rejection, like Jonah who ran in the opposite direction of his assignment and found himself being thrown off of a boat to be swallowed up by a great fish. 
Then, there are people to whom God has to write in episodes of rejection to bring them back to Him period, like the people of Jerusalem. 

To rephrase this, rejection can be calling specific, direction specific, or obedience and the lack thereof, specific. 
Either way, rejection will sting. I can't lie to you. We should embrace it though. We should be honored by it. Not horrified. 
We should also be honest with how we feel at the onset of it and don't let it sit and sink. 

My God! Check this out! 
One of my close friends reached out to me one day last week and told me that someone we both knew mutually from the past, invited her out to lunch. 
Well, the person happens to be someone that inflicted some major damage to my heart. 
Like literally broke me down and tore up my life real bad. 

I was surprised when she told me this but low-key optimistic. 
Nothing in me wanted to discourage her from meeting with them as I was genuinely eager to know what was to come of the fellowship.

A few days later after they'd met up, my friend called me to share how the meeting went. 
My heart was made glad to hear my friend divulge about this person's transition into maturity, and current deliverance journey. 
But then something happened as we changed the subject. 

My heart felt like it'd cracked open and hot lava was seeping through. Years worth of repressed pain rose up in my throat like acid reflux. 
I immediately alarmed my friend, 
"I feel funny." 
She asked me what was wrong. 
I started breathing hard and my eyes swelled with tears. 
I was honest and replied, "I feel rejected." 
*Thunder*

I explained to her how I didn't understand why this person went out of their way to meet up with her whom had not been hurt no where near as bad by this person as I had. This was definitely no shade to my friend at all. I just had to get this out.
Then I asked, "What about me?" 

I wasn't mad in my expressions. I was hurting with my heart leaking unexpectedly like it was. 
God swooped in on that conversation with the quickness and gave my friend the most perfect, most edifying, most comforting words to suture my heart right back up. 

Which confirmed an earlier point I made, rejection is only a slight to you if you make it a slight to you.  
In this particular case, the reconciliation I didn't even really know I was looking for until this event triggered it, has to do with timing and nothing else.  

Did I literally just try to take the bad rap away from rejection. 
I did.
If rejection has left a very bad taste in your mouth it's time to give it a Kanye shrug and keep it pushing. 
You can't allow yourself to mourn over a cup of spilled milk when God has ordained you for a whole land flowing with milk and honey! 
You see what I did there? 

 My prayer is that you can look at it from the angles I presented to you today and see where you fit. That way you can be intentional in your walk towards deliverance and keep rejection from developing into a POISON in your soul which will only cause you to act out foolishly. I would love for you to be able to take the sweet of rejection so that you won't be tangled up by the sour of it. 

Because the devil loves when God's people are hung up on who and what rejected them. 
That's one of the places where he gets his fresh recruits from. No lies. 
 The objective is to BE FREE AND STAY FREE! 

 If this message is making you feel some type of way right now, that's cool.
 Come over here by me and chill out. It took some time for me to swallow this pill too.
 Take this with you, God will keep going through great lengths to keep, YOU. 
And that's real talk.