Rebuilding Your Life after Rejection (Part 2)

How do you stop the “wearing away” of emotional erosion after rejection? How do you rebuild your self esteem and restore confidence?

Plant seeds of truth. After a devastating forest fire, erosion is contained by planting grass seed or building retaining walls. After a breakup, emotional erosion is shored up by planting seeds of truth and building supportive walls around your heart to retain the truth and prevent future erosion.

The seeds of truth come from reading and hearing God’s word, planting them in your heart and applying them to your life. In time there is growth, heart hedges holding your life in place—rooted and established.

“I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ...” (Ephesians 3:16-19, emphasis mine)

Rooted in God’s love and what He says about you, you can stand firm when you feel like your self worth is being washed away by the strong winds of someone else’s unkindness or how your hair turned out that day.

When your roots go deep into the source of life, the water of God’s word you stay fresh and growing. Plant seeds of truth and as they grow, you will be better able to take hold of your true identity—what God says about who you are.

Know your true identity. What is your identity? It is what your driver’s license says? Is it what you tell yourself, what others say about you, or what the world thinks? How you see yourself affects how you feel and what to do or don’t. It affects your level of confidence.

So often we want to hide the broken and less-than-perfect parts of our selves. Yet as we come to realize that Christ loves us in the middle of our mess, that startling love helps us to accept both our strengths and weaknesses, both the dark and light, and our self image becomes less broken and more whole.

Self esteem is the value you place on how you see yourself. It’s how content you are with that image. Of course, self esteem fluctuates but if it is too high it can lead to a prideful heart.

Perhaps you’ve seen a woman who thinks she is “all that.” Her smugness and conceit is contrasted with the person who has low self esteem: she thinks she is “none of that.” She focuses more one her mistakes instead of what she does right. She is often sad or fearful, and her insecurity prevents her from speaking up, taking chances, or moving forward.

Whether it’s too high or too low, ask yourself if your assessment of your self or situation is accurate. Ask God to give you insight.

A healthy view of yourself is balanced. A woman with a healthy self-esteem respects herself. She feels secure and worthwhile because of what God says about her. She has confidence in relationships and in life and generally more joy. She knows she has significance; she matters. With her sense of worth and value intact, she sits up straight and walks tall. Her head up, this confident woman is friendly, gentle and kind. She makes eye contact when she speaks, and she doesn’t constantly apologize for everything she says or does.

After a breakup, you may feel like your self esteem has plummeted because often rejection can make you feel unwanted, unloved, or unworthy. It’s hard to learn to trust again and you wonder about your judgment. Often women wonder “what is wrong with me?” when in reality a man has not beheld your true worth. And neither have you.

It’s important to remember that your value as a person is not based on what one person thinks about you. As you allow God to shift your self esteem from how you see yourself to seeing your worth and value through God’s eyes a realignment takes place. God empowers you to see differently, you begin to act differently.

You change your perception, and you change your life.

Emotional Erosion: Rebuilding Life after Rejection (Part 1)

The summer of 2002 had been one of the driest in decades and our state was enduring a drought when the largest forest fire in Colorado’s history, the Hayman Fire, started in the Pike National Forest.

Sadly, this inferno was ignited when a forest service officer was burning a letter from her estranged husband. The devastation was enormous; it caused thousands of people to evacuate their homes, totally destroyed over a hundred of them, and burned about 138,000 acres.

What a mess.

The intense heat of the fire had destroyed the protective layer of groundcover over the soil (like plants, grass, shrubs, and even litter). With the topsoil washed away, tree roots are exposed and unprotected, and the plant life is vulnerable to damage and depleted of nutrients.

Just as a forest fire can lead to erosion of soil, the fire of harsh words, negative comments or repeated rejection can begin to wear away at your self esteem.

What are some reasons our self esteem gets damaged?

Rejection is one of the biggest self esteem crushers, whether it’s from the crumbling of a long term relationship or an I-don’t-think-so brush off after a few dates. You hope, you wonder, and you take a risk with someone. Then you breakup and feel like you’ve lost again. It can do a number on your self esteem and you wonder how you’ll muster the confidence and courage to start all over with someone new.

A distorted perception of yourself. A “distorted perspective” of something is fuzzy and imprecise, and often untrue. When I was in eighth grade I got my first pair of eyeglasses. I remember looking out the window at the trees and noticing how clearly I could distinguish each individual leaf. With the clarity the glasses provided, blurry green blobs on a stick transformed into majestic maple and oak trees.

Sometimes we don’t see ourselves clearly either. The lenses through which we’ve been viewing our lives have been distorted by the constant criticism of a parent, the degrading comments from kids at school or by the downright mean way someone has treated you.

“Distorted images are not only shaping your perspective but are also hindering your possibilities,” says Jud Wilhite in Eyes Wide Open.

We need God’s better-than-20/20-vision to gain a clearer vision of who we really are, to come out of hiding, to be courageous, and to see ourselves as He sees us.

Loss of self. Instead of being misaligned, you may feel like your self esteem has been misplaced altogether. You feel lost because you lost yourself in the relationship. Maybe you were a people pleaser, a “yes” girl, and now you’re uncertain as to your identity and purpose. “Who am I apart from you? Who am I now?” Maybe you spent so much time on his life that you neglected your own.

He may have left you, but you left you as well, and you abandoned yourself.

Loss of self means you are out of touch with what you need and want. It is the ultimate abandonment when you don’t feel worthy to live in your own life. Your heart is like a deserted house, dark and empty, with boarded up windows and a fence in disrepair.

Stuck in the past. When hurtful memories from the past linger too long in your heart, they can wreak havoc on your self esteem in the present. An example from classic literature is the eccentric Miss Havisham in Great Expectations.

Jilted on her wedding day, Miss Havisham was so devastated that she left all the clocks in her house at twenty minutes to nine (because that was the time she received the heartbreaking news from her fiancé) and she never changed them again.

This woman held on to her hurt for years by leaving everything as it was on that dreadful day: the decaying remains of the wedding banquet littered the table, and she continued to wear the faded wedding dress. Every day she stared at painful reminders of the past as she clung tightly to “what could have been.” Feeling her life was ruined, she let her house and herself live in ruin.
How do you stop the “wearing away” of emotional erosion? How do you rebuild self esteem and restore confidence?

Stay tuned for more—Part 2 is coming on Tuesday.

Real Hope or False Hope? Knowing the Difference

Walking with HOPE is not a fairy tale. It's not like being in a Disney cartoon where bluebirds carrying colorful ribbons lead the way and happy chipmunks wave as you skip down the lane and daisies bloom instantly at your feet.

Nope.

It's all about knowing the difference between false hope and true hope.

Here's the thing. After a relationship ends, you may hope the one you cared about will come back. “False hope” is when you expect him to return when it’s highly unlikely or even impossible that he will. Because you want it to happen so badly, you may deny the reality that he is already in another relationship, that he’s married, or that—for whatever reason—he is going in another direction without you.

You can, however, be optimistic that things will get better in your life and that God has good things for you down the road.

False hope is like being a Pollyanna-—optimistic, yet blind to reality. It is wishful thinking or vain imaginations.

Real hope, biblical hope, is different.

Biblical hope is confident trust in the reliability of God’s promises. It is solid and strong because it is based upon God’s words in the Bible. “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” (Romans 15:4)

Hope presses on and looks ahead. “Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:13, 14).

Day or night, ask God to show you what to do, to guide your path so you can look forward with trust, not trepidation.

When Hope Road seems to zig zag and you cannot see the way ahead, Hebrews 10:23 encourages you to press on with confidence and perseverance. “Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.”

Finally, biblical hope believes that God will give good things. He protects and He provides as He sees best.

Eugene Peterson said, “Hoping is not dreaming. It is not spinning an illusion or fantasy to protect us from our boredom or our pain. It means a confident, alert expectation that God will do what he said he will do. It is a willingness to let God do it his way and in his time.”

When nothing seems to be happening…

When you are tired of trying to make things work out on your own…

When you cannot see ahead and you think things are taking entirely too long…

Hold on to hope.

The cadence of Christ is often unlike your own pace, but God is still at work, always at work, in your life.

Lifting the Fog When the Future is Unclear

Choosing to have hope is a “one prayer at a time; one choice at a time” path that leads to a more whole and healthier attitude and life.

You start out by taking your first steps. As you walk on, roadblocks may come your way, but you navigate obstacles with God’s help. As you choose to follow and keep following, you learn to listen and take action.

It takes courage to get and step out on a new path. Whether you begin hesitantly or with a let’s-have-an-adventure excitement, the important thing is that you begin-—and keep choosing hope. You seek the Lord and listen for his guidance. “Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it.’” (Isaiah 30:21)

By taking one step, and then another and another, you leave the old place of brokenness and rubble, fraught with complication and unanswered questions.

Even when the future is unclear and it feels like a primordial haze hangs over your heart, walk on. Because like the early morning low cloudiness in San Francisco, eventually the fog will lift and clarity will come.

Your blue sky days of joy will return.

A Road Map From Hurt to Hope

I’ve often wished the path from hurt to hope could be easier, clearer. When you decide to take a trip and pull out a map, you can locate a specific starting point and ending point. Plus, you have a destination, and when you get there you know you’ve arrived.

In breakup world, there is no perfect map.

There is a path each of us follows. There are good ideas and guidelines—and certainly God’s word—but how that combination works to get you to a better place is different for each of us.

There is no wooden sign that tells you the exact moment you are exiting pain and entering peace, as in “You are now leaving the land of loss” or “Welcome to the land of new beginnings.”

You have to walk in faith.

And you must choose which road to walk.

Your own “Great Awakening”
Time has passed since your breakup. Whether it’s been weeks, months or years, eventually your slumbering self wakes up and the light of God’s truth brings greater revelation. You have more awareness, insight and clarity about your pain and the relationship ending. You’ve come a long way in your healing journey.

And now you stand at a crossroads. There is a fork in the road and before you are two paths, one is the way of hope—Hope Road. The other is the path of hopelessness—Despair Drive. It is a defining moment, to have hope or not. Which road you will take?

Despair Drive follows the trail of bleakness. You just want to give up. You don’t want to deal with this “getting over a breakup” stuff any longer; you want to stay asleep and succumb to the darkness of disappointment. It’s too difficult, and it’s taking too long.

You show up for work or for lunch with friends, but a part of you is not really there. You’ve kind of checked out; the lights are on but no one’s home. You’ve been rejected and you can’t seem to get over it. Somehow you think a broken heart is incurable.

But beware: Walking down Despair Drive is dangerous. And not making a decision about which path to take is in itself a decision. It’s understandable to have a heavy heart after a breakup. But don’t “lose heart.” Resignation to hopelessness can lead to isolation, alienation and further misery. You may even often miss out on support, love and friendship, the very things you need.

Despair Drive or Hope Road? It’s your choice.

God has called you “out of darkness and into his wonderful light” (1 Peter 2:9) How will you answer?

When It’s Hard to Move Forward

If you are not yet ready for day, you may hesitate moving forward many reasons. Perhaps you seem to have a hard time letting go of the past. Your mind keeps wandering back to Memory Lane when things were good and life was happier.

Or, you stress and obsess that maybe he will reconsider. Thinking about this other person preoccupies most of the space in your brain. Maybe he will come back. What if he does? What if he doesn’t? Maybe your chance for love has passed; it’s all over, and nothing will ever change. For whatever reason, hope is stirring, but is thwarted.

You feel like you’ve been emotionally sleepwalking, going through the motions of life, but you’re not fully aware or awake on the inside. Or, you may be physically present but not engaging conversationally with people or with life.

You don’t really want to wake up on the inside because you don’t want to feel the pain. It’s just easier to numb out. Your circumstances still seem dark so maybe you think it’s only natural to want to “sleep” on the inside.

The problem is when you’ve been hurt and your hopes have been dashed, it can be hard to move forward and have hope—not only in a new relationship but in life. Especially if you’ve had many breakups, you get tired of the repeated discouragement. It hurts. It’s hard. And you never want to go through it again. So you put hope to sleep in your life because you don’t want to be disappointed again. You are stuck in your story.

And it’s time to get up.

Of course, adjusting to the light can be difficult at first. Often when I open my blinds in the morning and brightness fills the room, I have to squint at first. It takes time for your eyes to adjust, just as it takes time for your heart to adjust from the darkness of despair to the light of hope.

Dawn turns to day gradually, not suddenly. In the same way, heart healing from a breakup is a process. It’s a series of actions and choices. Healing takes time, and massive amounts of God’s truth being poured into you to combat the feelings and lies that say it will always hurt, it will never get better, or you will never find love again.

My friend Ken once remarked to me about the changing of the seasons, and how you don’t always notice an exact point when the transition occurred. It is gradual, and alights on you when you least expect it. But one day you notice that the lifeless, cement-gray world you’ve known for months has been transformed into to blue skies and blossoms. When did that happen? You see the effects of it, but you may not be aware of the exact moment it changed.

While there may not be a specific “mending point” in your heart healing, it may be a series of moments or progression of turning points. Moments like hearing the comforting words of a friend, or reading an insightful quote from a book, or learning a lesson from nature, or the unexpected warmth of God’s presence wrapped around you and you awaken to the realization that one day everything will be okay.

And you are well on your way to day—-and hope.

Awakening Hope

Even if you are not ready for day
it cannot always be night.
--Gwendolyn Brooks

Where I live in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, sunrise can be spectacular. The fingers of early morning crawl across the eastern plains, gradually illuminating the city skyline, and increasing in brightness to reveal—like footlights on a stage—the splendor of the majestic snow-capped Pikes Peak. You can almost hear the Director signaling His creation, “Cue the morning; let a new day begin!”

The sun bids the darkness farewell, and the earth awakens. It is a fresh start in your Heart Land as well, as your residual breakup pain fade and hope wakes up. Heartache is turning to healing.

At the break of day, birds chirp cheerily, the alarm rings (not so cheerily), and sunlight streams through your bedroom window announcing the arrival of morning. The aroma of fresh coffee or hot tea beckons.

But for some people it’s hard to get up and get going. It this half asleep-but-not-yet-awake stage, they rouse and stir a bit, yawn and stretch, and then roll over and go back to sleep. They don’t want to get up yet. It’s too early, or they’re too tired, or they simply have no motivation to get out of bed. Perhaps they want to hold on to the last vestiges of night and linger in the darkness.

Others, bless their “I’m a morning person” heart, are exuberant at the crack of dawn. They spring from slumber to waking with the lively energy of Winnie the Pooh’s friend Tigger, full of bounce and ready to start the day.

Either way, getting out of bed is a choice. Just as having hope is a choice. You can choose to stay asleep in the darkness of bitterness, resentment, and hopelessness. With the curtains closed tightly, and no light penetrating your heart, you wallow and mope, and keep moping.

Or instead, you could choose to follow the way of hope, and keep hoping, choosing to move forward into the full light of day—into the fullness of the abundant life of greater peace, joy and wholeness.

The outcome of each path is entirely different.

PRAYER: Here’s a prayer for you to read to yourself or out loud as you talk to God about how you’re feeling: Lord, I need more hope in my life. I need more of You. I feel like I’ve been asleep, dead to the world and dead in my heart. Would you help me to let go of discouragement and depression in my life? I don’t want to be like this anymore. I want to run to the feet of Jesus and find comfort, strength, and deeper character. Thank you for showing me that, in your loving sovereignty You direct and redirect my life. You have new things for me, good things. Help me to look forward with faith. Enlighten my heart to see your faithfulness--all you’ve done for me in the past, and all you are doing now on this road from breakup to better days. I put my trust in You. In Jesus’Name, Amen.