podium1How do you respond when your feelings are hurt?

What do you say when you are made to feel embarrassed?

How would you move forward when the people you work with suddenly see you in a different light?

Did you ever feel disrespected? Unappreciated? Unliked?

It can be hard to battle those demons, because they are psychological, not physical. Something happens, a problem arises, and your feelings get hurt because someone took something a way you didn’t intend. Or they reacted in a way that…maybe they felt it was the right course of action, but the end result is you getting railroaded.

As a result, you become the object of other people’s conversations, whispers, and discussions. You become the problem that people feel like they have to solve. It’s embarrassing and awkward and it wounds the heart not the body. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but give it six months and I’ll be good as new.

Words and feelings hurt for far longer.

Maybe you work in a profession where everyone smiles and everyone talks about being a support group but what goes unsaid is the fact that such a profession is very competitive, even though it shouldn’t be. The people in it tend to compare themselves to themselves, and—sometimes subconsciously—try to tear each other down.

Sometimes it’s nothing, sometimes it’s minor, sometimes it’s a pointless excursion even to let it bother you for one hot second. But sometimes, something happens—be it a fight, or a disagreement, or even a courtesy call whose courtesy is only on the surface—and you walk away thinking “they must not think very much of me…and they must not respect me, or even particularly like me very much.”

And when that happens, you can say all you want that “you’re a Christian, and Christ was disrespected more (which is true), loved less (which is true), appreciated to a far smaller degree (which is true)” but it still hurts. It’s like a parasite that crawls under your skin, gets in your blood and infects your heart.

And you can tell that person going through that to “just pray about it” but read your Bible; the Lord prayed in the Garden in great distress, and was comforted by an angel (Luke 22:43), but the very next verse says the Lord continued to be in agony. So there’s only so much an angel can do, you know?

Sometimes it just hurts. And it’s going to hurt. Until it doesn’t anymore. And when that happens, then you can move on.

When will that happen?