Seeds of Rejections (Part I)

I watched as my then 19-year-old son’s countenance began to change. He wasn’t as outgoing or confident as he usually was. Because we are so close, I noticed in our talks he’d ask, “Why don’t y’all women speak? I mean, I’m just speaking!” I asked myself why I didn’t. So I told him, “It’s the way a man speaks. If he’s speaking like he’s flirting, then I don’t respond. But if he’s sincere, I’ll speak.”

I watched as the days went by that he seemed weary and somewhat depressed. I prayed and asked God what I could do. He began to reveal to me how I had contributed to the problem. What? ME!?! What’d I do?

He revealed to me each time a man smiled at me and I looked away, complimented me and I didn’t respond, or spoken to me and I refused to acknowledge his presence – that I had just sown a seed of rejection into that man and was reaping the harvest of it in my son. He showed me it’s not my place to demand that a man speak to me in a certain way. That’s PRIDE. Proverbs 6:16, 17 says, ‘These six things the LORD hates, yes, seven are an abomination to Him; a PROUD look..’ As a child of God, Jesus commanded in Matthew 5:47, ‘… if you greet the brethren only, what do you more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so?’