I remember being about 5 or 6 years old and making my first best friend. Her name was Courtney and she lived 9 houses down from me. I would sprint to her house and we would spend the day watching MTV, playing in our secret hideout spot behind the bushes in front of her house, playing Sims, and feeding her pet turtle. We had sleepovers and went to each other’s birthday parties. She had diabetes, and when she had to prick her finger to check her blood sugar we would poke our fingers together. She was going to be my best friend forever. Until junior high came around. We got different friends, we started liking different things, and suddenly I didn’t have a best friend anymore.

Until 8th grade. A new girl started coming to school and I learned she lived right down the street from me. We became inseparable. Most of everyday we spent at her house listening to hip hop music, talking about boys, having sleepovers, going to the mall, having our parents drop us off at the water park to scope out cute boys. She wrote me a note once and told me we were going to be friends forever and that I was going to be her maid of honor someday. I was so excited, and I knew she was going to be mine too. Until sophomore year in high school when she started running around with different people. She called me on the last day of school that year and told me she was dating the boy I was in love with. (At least I thought it was love in 10th grade.) Suddenly I didn’t have a maid of honor for my wedding, and I didn’t have a best friend.

But then I made two new best friends. These two were the ones I knew I was going to stick it out with. There was a depth to our friendships that I hadn’t had before. We talked about God. We went to church together once in a while. We talked about deep things. I mean, until we all became rebels and started partying. We fell into the bad stuff together. We talked about the details of the bad stuff together. We cried together over broken hearts and hilarious karaoke nights. We met up at lunch everyday at school, and sometimes skipped class together. We went to school dances together and borrowed each other’s clothes. We went through all the stuff you go through in high school together. We were friends for life. Until I got caught up in being told a secret by one about the other that I wasn’t supposed to know, and when the other found out, she rejected me from her life. They continued on as best friends, and I suddenly didn’t have forever friends anymore.

I had a boyfriend once. He took my heart in ways no one else had. I was convinced that it didn’t really matter at the time. I had decided that he was all that mattered. I trusted him and gave him everything. He had to be forever because he had what the others never had. And he cheated on me. Suddenly I didn’t have a boyfriend and I also never got back the things he took with him. He found something prettier and shinier and he left.

I found Jesus after that. He became everything to me and I trusted him.

But I didn’t trust boys. Until the one came that loved Jesus and liked me. That was new. He was the first to open that space up again. We kissed a lot. We had hard conversations a lot. Then he broke up with me because we kissed a lot. I understood, but he didn’t want to fight for me. It wasn’t enough to fight for. I wasn’t enough to fight for. At least thats how I took it. I felt stupid for opening up again and vowed I was done being rejected.

I was on a mission trip once, and the leader’s wife put me in her small group throughout the month-long trip. She asked hard questions; dug deep until we spit out the vulnerable pieces of our hearts that were fractured and splintered. She wanted to be a counselor for us. And she was. I felt that she wanted to invest in me because of this and I felt special to think she wanted to walk with me in the spaces of my heart that hurt. Until I got cancer a while later. I called her and she never got back to me. She promised to come meet with me and she never did. She left me when I needed her most. And suddenly I wasn’t as valuable as I thought that I was. My walls grew higher and my heart grew colder.

I have so many more stories, but you get the point by now. I began wondering what was wrong with me. Why did no one want to stay? I had been told I was strong–was I too strong? Too intimidating? I had a large personality. Was it annoying? Was I too much for people? Not enough for people? Am I a bad friend and I just don’t see it? I’ve been, even recently, mulling over these questions in confusion wondering why no one stays. The only common factor in all of these stories is me.

But I think I have come to this simple yet profound truth: people leave.

That’s not me being narcissistic and cynical. It’s not talking out of pain, although I have a lot of that. It’s just true. People don’t tend to stick around. You’re a lucky human if you go through life with a lifelong best friend. People just don’t stick around for our whole life story.

And that hurts, ya know? Because the the tie to all of these stories is that little weed of a word called rejection. Relationships are where we experience the greatest moments of happiness and acceptance, and also where we tend to experience the lowest moments of pain or rejection. I am reading a book and there’s a part that says, “Rejection steals the best of who I am by reinforcing the worst of what’s been said to me.” And usually what’s been said to me doesn’t come from all these people; it comes from the devil. No one in these stories told me “You’re too much.” “You’re not enough.” “You’re ugly.” “You’re annoying.” But the enemy did. And every time I experienced rejection from these people, it solidified the “fact” that these lies the enemy was whispering to me were indeed true. Rejection is a weed. And it can be unbearably suffocating.

God has been pulling up deep roots of rejection in my life lately, and it has been pretty depressing. He’s been taking me back to these stories one by one, pulling up those raw emotions all over again and reminding me of broken fragments of my heart I had forgotten about. He’s brought me circumstantially to a lonely season alongside all of this, where I don’t have close friends around me like I did before. Wounded and alone. How pathetic.

But in the middle of this season, wondering why God isn’t taking this from me and then questioning if he has rejected me too, he brought this verse to my mind and my heart melted into His in a way it never had before.

He was despised and rejected–a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief.

Isaiah 53:3

My God knows this place. My God knows rejection, deep grief, sorrows. He doesn’t misunderstand these dark places in my heart. He had them in His heart, too. Jesus must have battled insecurity and self doubt all the time. He wasn’t always light-hearted and happy and bouncy. He was acquainted with sorrow and with deepest grief. He walked in dark places. He battled and wrestled over his identity because of rejection.

This place I am in right now–this rejection that has attached itself as a continual wound to my heart– this is what Jesus took with Himself to the cross. He nailed this place to the cross. He wore it when He died so that I could take it off someday. He made a way for me to be healed and restored from these things so I don’t have to carry them.

I get to partake in part of the suffering Jesus experienced. I know a part of Him because of this that helps me love Him more. And He knows me here, too. I am not disconnected from Him in this place; I am closer to Him than ever before! He went through the darkness so He could meet me here.

THAT is the God we serve. Not the God that is only always happy and smiley and bouncy and fun, but the God that proves in the middle of seasons of loneliness and rejection that not only is He the only one found faithful and loyal to us, but that He chose to walk through our darkness with us when no one else would. He chose to meet us in the deepest places of grief where we think He certainly won’t be found, and He surprised us. He is found in the deepest, darkest spaces of our hearts. Because He had those spaces too.