Rejected?
You're In Good Company: A Holy Week Devotion
Valerie had not seen her daughter for several years, but the occasion of Teresa’s birthday gave her a tiny drop of courage. Valerie longed to reconnect with Teresa, even if it only meant handing her a bouquet of flowers on a day she cherished, the day Teresa made her a mom.
Valerie approached the front door of her daughter’s home, her trembling hands clasping the lovely arrangement of summer flowers. She drew a deep breath and pressed the doorbell. As the door opened she lifted her chin and smiled, extending the bouquet towards Teresa. “Happy birthday,” she said. Her voice sounded soft and remote, like she was hearing it from across the street.
Teresa’s stone-cold expression crumpled into an angry frown. “Noooo!” she screamed. Valerie cringed at the shrill force of her grating voice.
Teresa grasped the door and slammed it shut with a woosh of air that slapped Valerie’s face like an icy wave. She blinked hard and clutched the flowers to her chest. She stood for a long moment, her body quivering, and then spun around and strode back down the walkway. She gently placed the flowers inside Teresa’s mailbox, their colorful blooms drooping over the edge. Biting back tears, Valerie got into her car and drove away.
*****
Valerie’s experience is a single scene drawn from a vast collection of stories from parents who have lost their adult children to estrangement. Each family’s experience of estrangement is unique, but the most common emotion that parents endure is an overpowering feeling of rejection.
There is nothing more damaging to the soul than rejection, and its pain is measured by the degree of love we invested in the relationship.
When those we love abandon us, a landslide of sorrow so overwhelms our life we wonder if we will ever survive the loss. It feels too big, too much, like the grief might swallow us whole. We feel unworthy of love, acceptance, and belonging.
The first initial shock wave of a broken relationship with our adult child often leaves us bewildered, fearful, and tearful. All we want is for things to return to normal, but that isn’t happening. We cry out to God and ask for relief, for our child to come back into our lives. But all our usual forms of prayer feel empty and ineffective. We wonder if maybe this time God isn’t listening.
*****
If you’re an estranged parent, Holy Week is an especially good time to reflect on your painful life circumstances. When we take the time to thoughtfully consider the final days of Jesus’ time here on earth, we find a magnificent, loving Savior who is intimately acquainted with the exact nature of our loss.
We learn that no one in the universe understands rejection better than Jesus—no one is better equipped to enter into our sorrow, comfort us, and heal us than our wounded hero.
The earliest prophecies about Jesus’ life reveal how humanity would respond to him:
He was despised and rejected—a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief. We turned our backs on him and looked the other way. He was despised, and we did not care. Isaiah 53:3—5
The gospel of John tells us,
He came into the very world he created, but the world didn’t recognize him. He came to his own people, and even they rejected him. John 1:10—11.
Even Jesus’ immediate family wasn’t convinced he was the Messiah. In one scene recorded in the gospel of Mark,
Jesus family heard what was happening and tried to take him away. “He’s out of his mind,” they said. Mark 3:21.
He was betrayed by one of his own disciples for thirty pieces of silver. On the night he was arrested by the Jewish leaders,
…all his disciples deserted him and ran away. Mark 14:50.
Throughout my years of working with estranged parents I have learned that many adult children have abandoned their Christian faith. They carry forward the ongoing history of rejecting Jesus’ saving love, and then they turn against us as well. When this happens we enter the “fellowship of Christ’s sufferings” a difficult, solitary life in which we no longer experience the affection and companionship of the people we love the most.
In our suffering and loss it’s good to read and remember the prayer that Jesus prayed for his disciples the night before he was crucified.
I have given them your word. And the world hates them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I’m not asking that you take them out of the world, but to keep them safe from the evil one. John 17:14—15.
Before you lose heart and think the Christian journey is just too much to bear, let’s consider what Jesus promises to those of us who have committed our lives to him.
When we suffer rejection from those we love, we enter an intimate connection with Jesus who suffered the most painful rejection of all. We are able to draw close to him and receive his merciful, healing presence into the depths of our pain and loss. This is not a consolation prize, like something Jesus throws our way because we aren’t worthy of anything better. It’s a priceless, spiritual connection we have directly with Him, a connection we cannot receive any other way.
It’s fainting into his arms, knowing he understands exactly how we feel.
Jesus has great compassion for our emotional and physical pain. The word compassion is defined as to “suffer together with another,” meaning that Jesus enters into our pain with us—he doesn’t just stand by and offer a handkerchief and a pat on the shoulder. I know it may be difficult to imagine that the God of the universe has the depth of love required to sit and suffer with you when you are hurting, but the gospels abound with examples of Jesus doing exactly this. Also, because we are undergoing the pain of rejection, we have a more personal understanding of the way Jesus suffered for us, even in a very small way. We draw towards each other in mutual comfort. It’s really quite beautiful.
Peter describes this experience as well.
…these trials make you partners with Christ in his suffering, so that you will have the wonderful joy of seeing his glory when it is revealed to all the world…So if you are suffering in a manner that pleases God, keep on doing what is right, and trust your lives to the God who created you, for he will never fail you. I Peter 4:13; 19
He will never fail you. Read that again.
“There is a divine alchemy in all faithful suffering,” writes Pete Grieg in his brilliant book God On Mute: Engaging the Silence of Unanswered Prayer. We don’t need to know the formula to experience the outcome. We can have the intimate comfort of Jesus’ presence in the darkest moments of our human experience. He does not require us to invoke any special prayers or sacred language to experience his amazing gift of love.
Dear friends ~ As you move through the passion of Good Friday, the silence of Holy Saturday, and the glory of Easter Sunday, I pray that you will experience the sureness of his peaceful and loving presence.
*****
Thank you for your words in this reading. I have a child who has abandoned the family. As a mother it feels heavy and rejection on his part as well as mine.
Thank you so much for these words. With several adult children some are walking with The Lord and some are not. There is some estrangement with a couple of them but not to the point of the story you shared. However, from your children any tiny bit of rejection hurts. Two nights ago I lay in bed crying because of slight rejection of a daughter to me and giving her dad, my husband of 39 years, love and preferential treatment. Any rejection hurts/stings and more so from your children, whom you bore.