People have to know you to reject you is a strange statement to write, but it is still true. The general consensus is that we often reject what we do not know, i.e., the unfamiliar, but that makes no sense. For you to reject something or someone, you must have some idea what the thing is or who the person represents. You must know what you are rejecting.
Ignoring Wise Counsel
For example, if you reject someone’s counsel about a situation, then it is not the first time you have heard that warning. Someone before the current person said something similar to you, and you decided not to heed that warning.
Now the warning has come back around, and you are forced to confront it, again, to pass the metaphorical course. If you do not accept whatever situation as presented to you, then you are essentially rejecting it or the person.
Familiarity Breeds Contempt
There is something in that person you are rejecting that is familiar. You may disagree with this assumption, but you remember your parents telling you to look both ways before crossing the street. As you got older, you decided to do your own thing. Consequences followed, and you were forced to relive that instruction and pass it as a life course before you could go on to greater battles.
The same is true about rejection and your previous exposure to a warning. If you are confronted with an opportunity to accept something, be it wisdom, learning a new way of doing something, or improving yourself so that you can advance, and you decide to reject that something or someone, then you can expect not to advance in a certain area until you pass that metaphorical course.
Maintaining Boundaries
Yes, you do have the right to embrace your “No.” You cannot take every opportunity. You would wear yourself mentally, emotionally, and spiritually thin. You would burn out psychologically. You would be stressed financially.
There must be limits.
This means that rejection and rejecting something out of a need to maintain boundaries is a healthy strategy to ensure that you have an impact over the long-term. Pouring all your heart, mind, soul, body, and finances into a situation, relationship, work, etc. will have a negative impact.
Life Shifts
However, there are some crossroad moments in life. There are some decisions that require you to make a shift. There are some doors you must acknowledge as learning opportunities for you to get to the next level. Not every door stays open as long as you think that door should stay open. Even doors have limits.
Eventually, that door will move on its own and shut itself. Maybe it is your activities throughout the rest of the house that causes the door to shut. Maybe it is on one of those physical timers, i.e., door stoppers that causes the door to close. Regardless, there is no guarantee that a door will remain open just because you exercise your will to choose when you want to acknowledge, walk through, and exit that door. You have as many rights as you want, but there are also consequences for rejecting that door.
Decision as Key
Your decision is literally the key to opening a door and walking through it. This means that rejection is a decision. For example, someone comes along and sees a need you have. That need could be emotional, spiritual, but it is usually financial. We all have financial needs, and when we are faced with confronting a decision to ask for help, we come up with a lot of excuses, we run ourselves down trying to find another option, and we try to work out the problem ourselves, as fruitless as it becomes.
But the person whose help you desire to reject is a person who has offered help before, without any real conditions. The person just desires to be helpful. However, you can be jealous of a person offering help and decide to reject that person’s help. You conjure up whatever reasoning you can muster for the sake of ignoring and acting indifferent towards that person. You may even be jealous that the person is financially capable of helping you.
What all these actions reveal is you are unwilling to change your thinking about the nature of help and who help might come through to you. It is God who sends a specific person to help you during a specific time and/or season in your life, and if you decide to reject that person’s help, then you will not get the help you need for that season in your life.
Gaps
You may do well in other areas of your life, i.e., get help from people you value and think are better suited to help you, but there will be a gap in your life development because you decided some time way, way, way back in your past not to accept help from “that person.” Who knows what that person could have done for you, especially if that person could have furthered you along on your journey. Deciding not to accept that help sets you up to struggle later.
Therefore, you must know the person for whom you are rejecting. When I suggest that people have to know you to reject you, I am suggesting that people often accept more help from strangers than they do the people they know. They value the stranger. They believe the stranger. They don’t have a history with the stranger. But the person that they have some familiarity with, whether short or long time, they will reject maybe out of spite, fear, or some other reason that they use to comfort their thinking and belief system.
Exceptions
There are some exceptions to the rule. As I noted, rejecting help from someone might set boundaries. If a person has hurt you in the past repeatedly and now that person wants to help, it would be hard to trust the person. There is some help you should not take because it might still be psychologically damaging to your psyche, especially if the person is a provoker, or the person frames you as a problem (i.e., scapegoating), or the person wants more than what you can give. Sometimes you just cannot take every help. Sometimes you just have to reject. That is your right, your free will, and your prerogative.
However, I’m talking about people who know you can help them, but they refuse to accept your help out of jealousy, fear of change, and/or feelings of superiority. “Who are you to do this for me?” This is a question a person may not necessarily voice. What the person will voice is this: “Naw, that’s okay. I got this. I’m cool.” The person will sit in their pride and arrogance knowing that he or she cannot pay their rent, their electricity is about to be cut off, he or she only has a few dollars in the bank to make it for the week, and he or she would rather just survive the situation than to ask for help.
People have to know you to reject you because they have to know what and from whom they are rejecting.
Thank you for reading.
Regina Y. Favors, Owner/Operator
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