Rejected in Love - What Now?

Are you madly in love with someone, would do anything for him/her, and you’re ready to give everything – but your love is not returned?

Are you familiar with this scenario? And have you often asked yourself “Why?” Why all this injustice and apparent senselessness? Do you feel it, this infinitely deep pain of rejection? – Welcome to the Broken Hearts Club!

But do you know who the king of this club is? The king of rejection, of sacrificial love? Who gave everything, really EVERYTHING, even his life, for YOU? Of course you know Him and what He did for you on the cross! And what can seem more meaningless than the cross if you don’t look at its deeper meaning? But if we really look closely at the cross it does give us the answer. The answer to all this supposed meaninglessness…

Imagine, if you have already suffered so much with your human love, how much Jesus must have suffered, who took on all our rejection and ingratitude – and still loves us so much that he could give His life! If there is an answer to suffering in love, then it has to come from that place on the cross.

So you are unhappily in love… Your heart hurts because you are not loved back. Then bring Jesus to your mind, who also, from worldly eyes, suffered seemingly senselessly and you can ask yourself: Why would He voluntarily take on all of that?

“For God so loved the world that he gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him.” (John 3:13-17)

But what exactly does it mean that we are thereby saved? Saved from what?

Another look at the cross gives us the answer: We are faced with a life of complete lovelessness if God has not saved us!

Now let’s turn the tables and say that someone is madly in love with you, but you are not in love with him/her. Because of your lack of love, won’t you try to avoid this person for all the world? Isn’t the love that you can’t reciprocate incredibly uncomfortable and embarrassing for you? This is exactly how we would feel (times a thousand) if we truly faced the Infinite Love of God, which we can never reciprocate to the same extent due to our limited abilities as humans!!

In order for us to get past this seemingly insurmountable block, God has made the way clear for us to come to Him. For Jesus took upon Himself all our sinfulness (which is really just a lack of love) and restored our original ability to love (if we allow it). But love cannot be forced. You can’t force anyone to come to you.

To become more perfect in love, then, the loving God encourages us to stretch our hearts and suffer so as to grow and draw closer to Him. As paradoxical as it sounds, these small and large sufferings in love give us the chance to advance in love, to jump over our shadow, and to come closer and closer to Him.

The rejection we experience from another person, therefore, can become God’s greatest gift to us! In our suffering we can say: Jesus, I unite my suffering heart with yours, I align myself more and more with your Infinite Love, and I choose to rush towards It! This is true comfort in suffering. And this is not in vain because it leads us deeper into what our heart truly longs for: to love and to be loved in the proper, God-given sense (even though we can never love or be loved by someone in the way that God loves each one of us).

“Yes, and just as you have truly forgiven me through your blood, so make up for me through the power of your precious cross all the loss of life,” said St. Gertrude of Helfta (1256-1301).