Do not be afraid if the world does not understand you and does not accept you; there is always the Heart of the Mother which will be your home and your refuge.
Blue Book #64 n
If we enter into his passion, and are ready to be crucified with the nails of rejection which hurt so much, we will know the joy of Christ. As St. Paul said, we can make up what is lacking in the suffering of Christ do we remember that? So when we are in pain–physical, psychological, spiritual- -we are capable of understanding why this pain was given to us. Then we lift our pains (and the pain of rejection is the hardest) into his cupped hands. It is like the water that is added to the wine in the sacrament of the Eucharist. The Lord takes our pain, especially the pain of rejection, and he uses it to help others across the earth.
Grace in Every Season (March 30)
Yesterday I posted on Facebook a photo of myself from 8th grade and so many emotions popped up. I’ve never felt accepted by my peers, and to this day I struggle to understand why. I think kids fear what is different… and I admittedly was.
As an immigrant, pretty much my entire existence was and continues to be different. I remember going back ‘home’ a couple of years after having moved here when I was seven, the hope was that I’d finally fit. But that’s not what I encountered… here I was ‘the Portuguese girl’ and there I was the ‘American’… SO bizarre. Nobody wanted to claim me.
But guess what… my Catholic faith did claim me, and I got to bring it with me to a new land when I was little and keep it with me as I moved from one form of rejection to another.
Even now, I sense there’s still some healing that needs to happen in this area because just when I least expect it, it pops up and the enemy uses it to tell me how useless and unloved I am and to drag me back into deep depression. Yes the pain of rejection is real and so very dark, because it comes from the pit of hell.
But God gives us an answer… Himself, and His family. And He invites to be part of this family and thereby He will be able to use us to be part of the healing of others. We don’t even need to know exactly how this will be…just trust.
Our pain is not part of His ‘perfect will’, He is not a Sadist, sitting there enjoying our hurt. But it is part of His ‘permissive will’, meaning that He does allow it, because He knows that He can use it for a greater good. We need to embrace that and keep it always in the front of our minds, and keep handing it over for Him to use. He will not snatch it out of our hands though.