LET. IT. GO. Blog Hop with Melissa Taylor

My friend and Proverbs 31 ministry partner Melissa Taylor just started an online Bible study of my new book LET. IT. GO. (You can still join us. Click here for details)

Today, she is hosting a blog hop with gals from around the country (and world) blogging about an aspect of the book. (If you are a blogger, you can see details here and join us!)

Be sure to hop over and check out the blog posts. They will encourage you in the area of letting go of the need to control and learning to trust God instead.

Some are talking about the tangents that knock us off course in our day. Others are blogging about the verse of the week. Others are confessing the areas of life (or people in life!) they like to try to control.

I’m gonna talk about the tangents.

I have one that trips me up often. It has been causing me to lose joy, time, sleep and mental energy since probably about the 3rd grade.

Ready? Wait for it…..

I am addicted to the approval of others.

There. I said it.

Since I was a little girl (and especially in middle and high school) I have cared waaaaaay too much about what others think of me. I can remember getting a painful pit in my stomach when a bunch of girls in the eighth grade, whom I’d hung out with for two years, decided they didn’t like me anymore. Didn’t want to sit with me at lunch anymore. Or invite me to their sleep overs or mall shopping trips. It was devastating to me to be left out and then overhear them in the hallway talking about what they’d done together. (Can’t imagine how that would feel today to see their fun splashed all over Facebook and such!)

As an adult, I’ve also wanted others to like me. It seems funny when I think about it. No one is liked by everyone in their life. But somehow, it always bothers me when someone has a negative opinion of me.

Then, I dwell on it. Let it rob me of joy. And time. And mental energy spent wondering why they don’t like me or trying to “fix” their opinion of me.

I can do fairly well when they don’t like me because of my faith in Christ. (Been slammed online for agreeing with the Bible on some black-and-white areas of scripture that current culture doesn’t like.)

The worst is when I find out that someone has a bad opinion of me that is based on something not true. Oh that hurts. And that is when I spin the wheels of my mind wanting to correct their incorrect image of me.

It happened just this week. A woman wrote a rather accusatory email slamming me for what she thought was a dishonest and shameful thing I’d done. She saw something I’d written here. She also saw something very similar on the site of a well-known Christian writer. She scolded me for stealing their material and running it on my site.

What she failed to check out was the signature line on the other site. I was a guest blogger for famous sister-so-and-so. The piece she’d seen was written by me. I hadn’t stolen anything. SInce it was a lesson God has been whomping me upside the head with a lot lately, I decided to write about it twice. (And I’m glad I did. It got one of the biggest responses I’ve ever gotten on both sites with women asking. “Have you been spying on me? I struggle with this too!”)

What hurt even more was that the email she sent made it to some ministry partners of mine. Now thankfully they clicked over to the post she’d seen and was so upset about and quickly saw at the bottom that it was written by me. Still, I let this whole affair bother me and my mind kept dwelling on it. It was a tangent that knocked me off course for a while.

At times like this, I have to tell myself God’s truth to block out the lies. My friend Renee calls this “bossing my heart around.”

The truth was that I hadn’t stolen anything. The truth was that this gal was remiss in checking out who’d written the blog post. The truth is, she’d harshly accused instead of gently inquiring. (Inquiring would have been to ask, “Hey, can you help me understand something? These two posts seems so similar but it looks like you only wrote one. Can you explain this to me?)

Inquiring doesn’t cause offense. It clears the air.

Thankfully God gave me grace to respond gently. It was really a mistake. She hadn’t seen that I was the guest post that day. In her mind what appeared to be true really was wrong. So I gently thanked her for her concern but explained that I wrote both posts. Then….. I LET IT GO!!!!

Are you someone who too struggles with what others think of you? Or with being left out? Especially in this era of Social media when you see others doing things together and realize you weren’t invited? Tell us about it today.

And don’t forget to hop over to Melissa’s blog hop and check out the other great posts.

NOTE: Winners! The winner of the contentment giveaway is Amanda S.: comment left 2/4 at 5:46 pm and the winner of No More Perfect Moms is Meg: comment left 2/5 at 9:51 pm. Please email your home address along with what you won to [email protected]