God Is Not Mad at You: You Can Experience Real Love, Acceptance & Guilt-free Living by Joyce Meyer

man came to him offering several corrections. He began his confrontation with, “What you said today grieved my heart. I think you are arrogant, rude and prideful,” and Steve replied, “Bingo, you have read me well; if you had known me several years ago, you would have been even more grieved.” Steve is not afraid to be challenged, because he already knows he is not perfect. He says that whenpeople tell him he is wrong about something, he says, “Bingo, I am wrong at least 50 percent of the time.” Or, if someone tells him he is selfish, he says, “Bingo, my mother told me the same thing, and my wife knows it, too.”
    Just think how much anger and emotional pain this saves him. If someone rejects us because we are not perfect, it won’t bother us if we are already aware that we are not perfect and have no problem with it. It is not really what people say and do to us that makes us miserable, but how we respond. If we have a healthy attitude toward ourselves, we won’t be bothered by what others think.
    Yesterday, I went to an appointment I had and a woman recognized me. She asked if she could hug me and while doing so said, “I don’t care what people say about you; I think you are wonderful!” She could have just said, “I hear a lot of people say bad things about you.” I admit that I felt a little pinch of pain when she said it, but I quickly shook it off and went on to have a great day. I actually laughed with others about what she said several times. I thought it was ironic in light of the fact that I was working the day before this on the chapters in the book on rejection.
    I also thought about how I handled the situation compared to how I would have handled it twenty years ago. Back when I still had a root of rejection I would have wanted to know who said bad things and exactly what they said. Then I would have defended myself and probably been upset for days over the thought that people are saying bad things about me. I am so glad I didn’t have to wear myself out emotionally with being upset over what some people think. I choose to believe that the people who like me outnumber the ones who don’t, so I will focus on the positive and stay happy. You can choose to do the same thing any time you encounter a similar situation.

Do You Need a Fix?
    When I say “do you need a fix,” I am not talking about drugs. I am talking about a fresh fix of strokes from people making you feel important just to get through every day. When we don’t know our value in God, we look to other people to make us feel valuable; however, they don’t always know what we need, and even if they did, they might not know how to give it to us.
    Now that I see clearly, I realize that the majority of Dave’s and my problems in the early years of our marriage were due to the difference in our personalities, or to my having expectations that he didn’t realize I had. In marriage we seem to want our spouses to be mind readers and always know what we want, but they don’t. How often do you get hurt because you assume someone has enough common sense to know what you want, but that person doesn’t? If we fear rejection we may be reluctant to state our need clearly. We may drop a hint, but we don’t want to clearly tell someone what we need just in case that person rejects us.

Many Tears
    I shed many tears over the years because Dave was going to play golf and I “expected” him to stay home and pay attention to me, or to ask me what I wanted to do that day. I wouldn’t ask him to stay home and do something with me, but instead I wanted him to “want” to, or to know that he should. I wanted him to sacrifice his desires for me so I would feel loved and valuable.
    One day after crying most of the day and being completely miserable I finally thought, “This is stupid I know Dave loves me and that he would never hurt me intentionally, so why do I feel soutterly crushed?” The answer was that I was still reacting to the root of