Anyone else tired from trying to say and do ‘the right thing’ in relation to every friend or acquaintance? I am sometimes tired because it feels like it is such a moving target. I am a people pleaser by nature (largely because of my own pride—I don’t like to be disliked…).  Yet I also have strong convictions about things like respect and truth and love, so I seek to have integrity in how I live. I want to live authentically and humbly, listening carefully to others’ perspectives while living out my own convictions with grace and truth wherever I go. The problem is that I can’t control whether someone feels my actions as respectful and loving; I can only determine my intentions and actions.

For example, it is tiring because if I forget to text someone back, it can be read as an intentional “ghosting” and can be a crack in a friendship that results in a feeling of coolness that you can’t figure out where it is from. It is tiring because when I try to be friendly to a stranger’s child, she literally yells at me for overstepping boundaries and critiques me for being too protective of my own 3 year old child (who, incidentally, she doesn’t know anything about, and doesn’t know was just swinging on the monkey bars by herself a few minutes ago…). It is tiring because I want to ask people deep questions about how they are doing because I really care about them and their families, but I don’t know if they will take offense and see me as overstepping. It is tiring because I don’t feel like I have enough energy or emotional capacity to care for people the way I want to, and then am often worried that they don’t know how much I care.  It is tiring because I can’t even give each of my kids the level of individual attention and investment that I wish I could, let alone give the kind of focus I would like to give to each of the amazing and beautiful young women that I am mentoring.  It is tiring because I am deeply afraid of being misinterpreted…

So what do I do with all of this? I feel like there are really only a few choices. 1) I can let it slowly crush me as I continue to try to stand up under it, telling myself that I can do better and to just try harder… 2) I can pretend it is just a season and I ‘just have to get through it,’ 3) I can give up and just try to make myself happy; or 4) I can fix my eyes on Jesus, knowing that he sees me, not my adequacy.

I want to choose to fix my eyes on my Savior. Yes my savior; he is the savior of the world, but it is also personal. I needed and need saving. And he knows it. He knows my inadequacy.  Jesus is the one who loves me even as he expects me to fail; he is the one who invites me and enables me to participate in meaningful work in my life; he is the one who experienced rejection and pain and suffering well beyond what I could ever bear. Psalm 103:13-14 reminds me, “As a father shows compassion to his children, So the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust.”

I also want to fix my eyes on him because he offers freedom from fear. I want to be free from my fear of people, especially my fear of being misinterpreted. Some of the deepest emotional wounds for me happen when someone assumes I had negative desires or intentions, when what I actually intended to communicate was nothing like that. I have tried to reason my way out of the scars that such interactions leave on me. I remind myself that I am responsible for me, not them; I try to remember that they may have extra credit behind the reaction that goes beyond what I did; I try to tell myself what is true of me as a child of God, and to just not care what the other person thinks… But it doesn’t always seem to work.

As I look to God’s Word to understand true “freedom,” I am reminded that “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” John 8:36. I am free from measuring up because He has paid my debt and has adopted me as his own beloved child. I am free from guilt because he has forgiven me “according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us…” Ephesians 1:7-8. I am free to confidently walk in relationship with God because “he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” Philippians 1:6.