Obstacle # 8: The fear of rejection.
Often I have been passed by at a fellowship table and have not been recognized as a minister. I have attended pastors' meetings with my women associates, and no one would talk to us or even recognize our presence. If I took my husband or a male associate, then other male pastors might engage in conversation with me since I was with a man.
I have found the secular world does a much better job relating and communicating between the sexes than the church world does. We talk love, but we just do not know how to exercise it well with co-laborers of the opposite sex in God's kingdom.
As I look back over my years of ministry, many things have happened to challenge my character, calling and heart before God. Each obstacle has helped me mature as a woman minister. In the process God has taken my basic feminine lamb-like nature and equipped me to also be a lion. I have discovered that operating in both mercy and might requires the furnace of affliction, His power to overcome, His Word to reveal truth and His love to forgive.
God's will fulfilled in my life is more important to me than being ignored, ridiculed or used as a token. I have found peace with my Lord and Maker and do not need to defend myself, prove myself or do anything other than obey my Father's will. God fights for me. I believe there is greater merit in forgetting those things which are behind and pressing forward toward the mark of a higher calling, rising above all obstacles to accomplish the full purpose of God in my life.
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