Avoiding pain
When you try not to feel the negative in your life, you end up not feeling the positive. There is nothing meaningful or pleasurable if you take away pain. We fear the negative pain of rejection the fear of being scrutinised and evaluated. But if we don’t experience rejection, scrutiny and evaluation we don’t get to our potential. We are trying so hard not to feel anxiety by distancing ourselves from social pain. It is almost as if we are trying to take a pill, by doing so we end up on an emotional avoidance detour. By actually trying not to experience fear, anxiety, rejection, scrutiny we lose out. In Peter’s first letter he says, “these [trials] have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” Invite someone to take a closer look at Christ and his church.
