Rejection...

"It's a dangerous business Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to." -The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

"But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine." -Isaiah 43:1

When your best friend has a masters degree in sports psychology, you get used to a couple of things. First, they'll post lots of motivational pictures on Instagram and Facebook. Lots of motivational quotes.

Second, every now and again he'll call with some crazy idea for inspiration or life-improvement. This isn't a bad thing, by any means. But sometimes they are fairly out there. Two years ago was one of those times.

I got a call from Will telling me he'd just watched a Ted talk. This wasn't the first time a conversation had started this way. But I took the bait. "It's all about the art of rejection," he said. And suddenly, my ears perked up.

You see, if I'm an expert at anything, it's rejection. Well, let me rephrase, I'm an expert at receiving it. I've got a fairly healthy portfolio of failure. It keeps me humble. Needless to say, I was interested in hearing more.

Will proceeded to tell me all about this guy named Jia who had begun to experiment with rejection. 100 days of it. His thesis was simple: we don't experience everything we could because we assume we'll hear "no" before we ever ask. So he just started asking people for things. He found a neighbor who let him use the backyard to practice soccer. He found flight attendants who let him do the safety announcements. He got the people at Krispy Kreme to put 5 glazed donuts together and glaze them in the colors of the olympic rings. How cool!

So Will thought we ought to try a week of this. Being the kind of guy I am, I agreed. I started with a surefire rejection. I asked my dad to go skydiving with me. HA! It was a hard "no." But I was undaunted. The next day I had to go to Best Buy with a friend, and I decided to ask if I could drive the Geek Squad Beetle around the parking lot. Again, a flat rejection.

But then I struck gold! I went to Frankie's Bar and Grill to watch some NBA basketball after work. The best thing about Frankie's? Before 7:00 they sold personal, 1-topping pizzas for $1 with a drink order. When the waitress came to take my order, I asked for two pepperoni pizzas, with one caveat: could she ask the cooks to make a snowman with the pepperonis? She was confused, but took the request to the cooks.

12 minutes later to cooks emerged from the kitchen with their creations. They'd turned it into a competition for who could make the best snowman! They said it was the most fun they'd ever had making a pizza. How about that for risking rejection and looking silly?

I'm becoming more and more convinced that fear holds us back from so much of the life God intended us for.

My favorite question to ask people is simple: "What is your deepest fear?" It's an incredibly probing question, and fairly inappropriate for a first meeting. But it says so much about who we are.

It's probably no surprise that "do not be afraid" is the most oft repeated commandment in scripture. It's the one we need to be reminded of most! Some of us are scared of spiders or snakes. Others are terrified of confined space or public speaking.

But of course, fear often runs much deeper. Years of experience have taught us that rejection is around ever corner, so we never risk the possibility of being loved for fear of being rejected. Relationship after relationship has ended in disappointment, so at the first sign of things becoming too good we run to avoid the letdown. We're so scared at the prospect of failure that we never play our hand when the time comes, never investing the hard work for fear it will prove a waste of time.

Or scarier still, we've become so scared of change, so comfortable, that even if we can smell the scent of God's whisper calling us to a deeper, richer life, a life of consequence and meaning, we balk at leaving the environment we know for a new place.

To be quite honest, none of these are my deepest fear. Yes, I know them all too familiarly. They've left scars on my past. But no, mine is somewhat different. I'm intimately afraid of being forgotten. I'm afraid that my life is an interchangeable piece that could be filled by anyone else.

I know it's unreasonable. In my head I know it. But fear rarely stops to let the brain process with reason. It plays on our reflexes and instincts. It skips the will and moves straight to the response.

Confronting our fears demands our deepest honesty. Before we can respond to fear, we have to do the brutally and painfully honest work of acknowledging that which most frightens us. Only then do we get to break the habits and patterns that fear dictates. Only then do we get to dream of what can be and then run after it.

So may we remember that with God fear does not get to have the last word. May we come to recognize the ways in which fear has come to direct our choices and our outcomes. And may we begin to say "No more" to fear winning. May we begin to ask big, audacious questions about what God is calling us to and leave rejection out of it, for where God leads us God will not abandon us.

forever unfinished...