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

rejection. I still didn’t know God’s love deeply enough to make me know my value, so I needed a “fix” from Dave. Sadly, I needed one almost daily, and that pressured him.
    I am asking you to be very honest with yourself and try to see clearly regarding any difficulty you may have in relationships. Are they connected to the way you feel about yourself? And if so, is it really fair to ask someone else to keep you fixed all the time? I believe we must take responsibility for our own happiness, because nobody else can keep us happy all the time, and they shouldn’t have to.

You Hurt My Feelings!
    How often have you said to someone, “You hurt my feelings,” and had that person reply, “I wasn’t trying to hurt your feelings”? It used to happen between Dave and me on a regular basis. I will relate two personal examples that I shared in my book
The Root of Rejection.
    Dave and I were playing golf together and he was having a really rough day. If you know anything about golf, you know that a person can be a really good golfer and still have days when he cannot seem to do anything right. Dave was having one of those days. As I have a mothering instinct, I felt really sorry for him, and while riding down the fairway in the golf cart, I patted him on the back and said, “You’ll get a breakthrough and everything will be fine!” He responded, “Don’t feel sorry for me; this is good for me! You just wait and see, when I come through this, I will play better than ever before!” When Dave wouldn’t receive my comfort I was once again crushed. I literally felt as if I had collapsed on the inside. I thought, “You are so pigheaded! Younever need anyone to comfort you. Why couldn’t you have appreciated my comfort?” Still hurt and seething inside with anger, I was driving home in silence when the Lord whispered in my heart, “Joyce, you are trying to give Dave what you would need in this situation, and he doesn’t need that, so he didn’t receive it.” I realized that I felt rejected because I expected him to need what I needed, and he didn’t. His personality is different from mine and he didn’t have a root of rejection in his life.
    Another lesson for me occurred while Dave and I were at the post office. Dave had come out of the post office, and I started to tell him something that was important to me. I was into my story and noticed that Dave wasn’t paying attention to me. He said, “Look at that man coming out of the post office! His shirt is ripped all the way down the back!”
    I said, “Dave, I am trying to talk to you about something important.” And he said, “Well, I just wanted you to look at the man’s shirt.” I felt he was more interested in the man’s ripped shirt than he was in me, and once again I felt the crushing pain of what I viewed as rejection. The entire episode was a simple difference in our personalities and had nothing at all to do with Dave rejecting me. He is a “watcher,” and I am a “doer.” Dave loves to watch things and people, and he notices all the details. I wasn’t interested in the man or his ripped shirt, I was only interested in reaching my goal, and that was telling Dave what I wanted to tell him.
    When Rebecca was a little girl, she was a bit like Dennis the Menace, full of good intentions but always getting into trouble. It seemed that no matter what she did, something always ended up going wrong, and it was always her fault. It got to the point that whenever anything went wrong, Rebecca’s mom and dad alwaysjust assumed that it was Rebecca’s fault. Usually they were right, but sometimes they were mistaken.
    On many occasions, Rebecca’s mom would walk into the kitchen and see some water spilled on the floor, or she would see a snag in the upholstery of a chair. Whatever she found wrong, she just assumed that Rebecca was the culprit. As a result, there were many times over the years when Rebecca would get punished for something she actually