“wide lawns with narrow minds.” Ernest Hemingway
It’s time to look within you and pursue excellence. Your heart and your soul matter to God. He created you unique with your
very own thumbprint.
Twenty years ago I was invited to a meeting that took me all this time to understand. I’m not sure I knew what I did wrong but I was persecuted by five or six men and two women. It was so unexpected that I was in real shock. After the shock I felt the pain of being hated for being different. I’ve always known I was different but the accusers’ fury and hate in the name of God was confusing at best. The irony is I loved these people.
When I left that meeting I was numb to the bones. Rejection feels like death.
Before Christmas last year, I was talking to someone who said that their organization thought I was arrogant. I didn’t feel arrogant I really felt confident in Christ who gives me strength. But his words stung me to a stop.
What he said opened my eyes to see the truth. Its not about me. Its about what they thought I was. Projection? I dont know. However through the years of research I realized I had to go through the fire. God was doing something in my life through them and I just needed to be still.
A refiner’s fire is where a material, such as silver, is placed in a fire to cleanse and burn away any impurities so that it becomes pure silver without blemish. YAHWEH, the LORD, is the refiner who will put us into the fire to cleanse us of impurities and injustices. Some hard parts had to be hammered out. Too many hard edges I had built around me like a wall to survive in a hostile world. They needed to come off so I can build a fence [personal boundaries] with a door and a latch.
There is a fine line between arrogance and confidence. And as our society moves further away from being able to withstand discomfort. I see more and more people who
confuse confidence for arrogance. The truth is that confidence often makes people uncomfortable. Being witness to a confident person can easily activate feelings of insecurity and self-doubt and jealousy. These feelings are difficult for many and unbearable for some. And so it is in that discomfort that they choose to identify someone else as arrogant rather than confident. Because if they can expeditiously persecute the other then it gives a vehicle for offloading that which is uncomfortable and allows them to not look inward.
Confidence and arrogance are easily conflated, given that they both stem from self-esteem. However, confidence is a result of high self-esteem and self-awareness, whereas arrogance comes from a lack of SELF-WORTH.
Once I understand my accusers and persecutors I can honestly forgive them. ♡