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Nearly every morning, I post a Scripture as my facebook status. It can be anything from a verse or two the Lord brings to mind while I’m praying, or a portion of what I read as I read my way through the Bible this year.

I couldn’t decide between two Scriptures to post this morning, and the one I didn’t post still seems very relevant this morning:

“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.” ~Philippians 3:10-11 (NIV)

Is there anything else that really matters in this life? What we see — our circumstances — is temporary. Light and momentary. What we can’t see — the power of his resurrection, and the future glory awaiting us — is eternal. (2 Corinthians…

The process of writing and publishing includes rejection as part of the process. God uses rejection to help us clarify and refine the vision of our work. This painful experience and how we handle it can determine the course of our life’s work. God is very interested in our work.

When I handle my rejection as a spiritual matter I bring God in to the solution.

Three steps are presented in Andy Stanley’s excellent book Visioneering, using Nehemiah as a model for handling criticism. We go back to these steps in times of rejection and criticism.

1. Pray

“Criticism strikes an emotional chord in us. The emotion must go somewhere. To reflect it back to critics is to play their game. To bottle it up inside can result in depression or ulcers. Another option is to dump it out on someone completely unrelated to the situation: spouse, friends, employees…

While getting ready for school this week, my daughter stopped putting on her shoes to look up at me, and with concern in her voice said, “Mommy, I want to talk to you about something.” I knew she was serious, as her tone and body language completely changed, and she stopped what she was doing. She explained that she had a bad dream that night and was afraid. In it, she had hurt her hand while playing at a pool and tried to find me for help, only to see me and the family leaving without her. She was sobbing as she told me how sad she was that we left her in her dream.

My heart was broken for my little girl who felt such despair from something that wasn’t even real. But, it was real to her, because she lived through the dream. I picked her up when…