“Submission is not about authority and it is not obedience; it is all about relationships of love and respect.”
JOURNAL
Years ago I read The Shack, and while it was not the book itself that healed me, it became a doorway. It helped me confront how much bitterness and anger I was quietly carrying. I had learned to use my wounds as justification for my compromises. I blamed people, circumstances, and outcomes for my failures while protecting my resentment as if it were evidence that I had been wronged. I was living from hurt rather than from truth.
Recently, while listening to the Human School podcast, songwriter Ashley Gorley said something that struck me deeply in this same space. He spoke about rejection not as something to avoid, but as something necessary. Necessary not only to endure, but necessary to keep going through. Rejection, in his telling, was not a signal to stop, but a refining force that strips away what cannot sustain a life of meaning.
That idea connected immediately with what God has been slowly teaching me.
The deepest issue was never the pain itself. Pain is inevitable. Betrayal happens. Loss is real. The problem was how tightly I held onto those wounds and how much identity I wrapped around them. I wanted vindication. I wanted certain people to feel what I had felt. I wanted to be comforted, celebrated, and affirmed in ways that would somehow undo the past.
What began to change everything was not obedience or discipline or trying harder, but recognition. I began to see that the Spirit of God was not something I needed to earn or summon, but something already present and woven into who I am. The same Spirit that shows itself in creativity, courage, beauty, and love was already alive within me. When that truth surfaced, it did not demand effort. It invited surrender.
Laying my pain before God was not about yielding to authority. It was about returning to relationship. It was about releasing what I had been clutching and realizing that everything I had been desperately chasing belonging, worth, love, and purpose had already been given. God’s love was not waiting on my performance. It was not fragile. It did not diminish when I failed. It became part of me, sustaining me even when I resisted living from it.
That realization was difficult then, and it still is now.
There are days when old wounds resurface. There are days when I feel the familiar ache for acceptance. But I am learning that human love, though beautiful, is always imperfect. To expect people to love without limitation is to place on them a weight they were never meant to carry. That expectation does not lead to hope. It leads to disappointment.
Yet we are not without hope. Not because life becomes easier, but because union with God changes how we endure it. Jesus did not come to remove us from suffering. He came to inhabit it with us. Trusting Him does not inoculate us against heartache. In many ways, it expands our capacity to feel. But it also anchors us in something unshakeable.
Rejection does not undo what God has placed within us. It refines it. It clarifies what is real. And when the Spirit that animates creation is the same Spirit alive within us, we can keep going, not because the road is easy, but because the source does not run dry.
We are given strength to endure.
Love to overcome.
Grace for the moments when we fail.
And that grace does not leave, because it is no longer external. It has become part of who we are.
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