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There are times in life when you just feel like you could crawl up into your bed, duck your head under the covers and pray that you would just never have to come out again.  I know, that if you are reading this, that you’ve had a moment like this in your life.  If you are really honest with yourself you can find a time.  Maybe you didn’t literally crawl into bed, maybe you went to work or went to work out or bought one too many a drink at the local pub or maybe even simply turned on the TV and escaped into some fantasy land that you for a second thought you were part of.  But NCIS or The Office or Lost aren’t reality and after the half hour of your escape, they kick you our of their wonder land and you are still on your couch wondering why “it” happened. 

You know what I’m talking about, it’s the title of this thing you’re reading.  Rejection. The pain of it can be crippling can’t it?  You don’t want to do anything accept get as far away from it as possible, as well as the wake of pain and heart ache that soon follow.  Maybe you are like me and your eyes fill up with tears and there is that lump in the back of your throat that won’t let you say anything.  Or maybe you get angry and shout and stomp and throw things.  Or maybe you are a little tougher skinned and you pretend that it doesn’t bother you, but hoping all the while that you can keep your cool or you’ll loose it.

Well, I’ve just experienced something that I hope I can convey to you in a way that makes sense.  We all know what it’s like to feel the sting of the pain when someone rejects us, but I was just experience the pain of knowing that I was on the reject-er end of the ordeal.

I made a mistake, I did something that directly disobeyed God and chose to go my own way rather than submitting and running from the sin that so easily entangles me.  I spit in God’s face and while he was sitting right beside me, I chose sin over Him.  I later repented and asked for forgivness and that God would extend grace to me, again.  And he did, in a gracious way I wasn’t expecting.  He opened my eyes to reality of my rejection of Him and His ways.  I saw that I had done to him the same that has been done to all of us so many times, that have caused us so much suffering and heart ache.  I saw the rejection.  I really saw the pain that it caused Him.  I saw the tears well up in the Father’s eyes as he looked at His son Jesus who was there to take the the beating and crushing on the cross so long ago.  I was reminded that it was me who sent Christ to the cross for the sin I so easily chose tonight.  I saw the Father reminded of the pain His son went through for ungrateful men like me.  And during this I was struck with pain.  My eyes welled up as I came to the knowledge that I, like all of us are capable of doing to others the very things that we wished had never happened to us and hoped would never happen again.

I am opened to the fact that we like sheep have gone astray, each of us has gone our own way, but He, our gracious Father doesn’t want us to be seperated from him.  So, He calls in the night to his unfaithful sheep to see and to learn and to change.  To be filled with the knowledge of Christs death and resurection, and so be awakened to our depravity and desperation for a Father that is patient and forgiving but is never asleep to moments like these.