When we know Christ, it should show in our overflow, regardless of our relative success or discouragement in the face of rejection.

To live is to love. To love is to risk pain. To risk pain is to live. It's what it means to truly be human. As fragile as dust. The breaking of us. The making of us. The building up of our faith.

If we place our hope and future in the hands of our unchanging, unflinching God who never leaves us or forsakes us, we'll find healing and freedom. We'll be able to see something on the other side of all the pain. Something good. Something we know will be so wroth whatever it takes to get well. So instead of running from the pain, we embrace it as necessary. We must feel pain to heal the pain. If we never allow ourselves to feel it, we won't acknowledge it's there.

When we think the process of longsuffering is unbearable, we must remember it would be deadly for God to put us up on that solid rock before we are strong, firm, and steadfast. And it would be cruel for Him to require us to sing before we have a song.

It's easier to construct a more palatable life story—where I can draw straight lines from each hurt of the past to the healing I later experienced—than to face the raw truth. I prefer to neatly match each hard part of my testimony with the soft place I landed in the middle of God's grace, forgiveness, and restoration as proof I am walking in freedom.

Let your past rejection experiences work for you instead of against you by allowing them to help you sense the possible pain behind other people's reactions.

Brokenness is what must happen before God can put the pieces back together in the way He can shine through the best.

The gravity of living in a sin-soaked world will always try to hold us back from living loved. But if we will remember to return often to our Instructor . . . our Creator . . . we will discover His loving hands still pulse to continue making us. Tweaking us. Molding us. Filling us. And daily completing the good work He began in us.

No, that relationship didn't work out. But that doesn't mean you'll never find love. It also doesn't mean you aren't capable, likable, and lovely.

We see that all those harsh realities aren't the end, but rather a temporary middle space. Not the place where we are meant to wallow and dwell. Rather the place through which we will have to learn to wrestle well.

Grace doesn't give me a free pass to act out how I feel, with no regard to His commands. Rather, His grace gives me consolation in the moment, with a challenge to learn from this situation and become more mature in the future.

Though it felt so permanent at the time, in the scope of my life, I can now see it was truly just a short-term setback from which the Lord delivered me.