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Greetings. Welcome to my post. One of the most important aspects of living the Christian life is to understand the importance and experience of acceptance. Acceptance is vital to our lifestyle and also to our Christian life because when we feel accepted, then we feel love and acceptance for who we are. But when we don’t participate in acceptance and instead choose rejection and criticism, then acceptance becomes our enemy and damages our walk with God and with others.

So let’s began by viewing acceptance as an enemy. Acceptance becomes an enemy when we fail to accept ourselves. You stand in front of the mirror and you look at yourself and you began to judge or criticize your looks or your body features. Or sit down at the end of the day and you think about your various encounters with people. You began to think about how your talked to someone or think about various character traits within yourself and you start to think of ways in which you were not accepting of someone else.

Acceptance does not become your friend or is an enemy when you start to feel this feeling: Failure. Acceptance is not your friend when you exchange acceptance for failure. Failure happens in our life when we start to view or feel or think we are falling short of some standard in our life. Maybe you have an ideal view of your body. You conclude you should always look like some model or female actress or some male athlete or actor. You view your body only through the lens of comparison and when you view your body as a comparison, you start to feel like a failure in that comparison.

Failure has to do when you compare your real self with an ideal self. An ideal self is the pressure we all put on our life by striving to be perfect or ideal. We cannot accept the reality of who we are due to comparing how our body looks with how we ideally think our body should be like. Acceptance becomes your enemy when you start pressuring or start to place standards of ideal upon how we look and we exchange acceptance for failure.

For example, all of us can fall into the trap of failure when we don’t live up to some ideal such as an ideal intellect, or ideal talent, or ideal body, or ideal hair, or some other imagine ideal about some aspect of who we all are. As a result, over the years we start to feel less acceptance for who we are and we start to have negative thoughts or feelings about who we are and our failure to live up to some ideal.

Acceptance as our enemy begins due to the emotional tone of how we view ourselves. When the ideal is used to judge the real as unacceptable or a failure, then this judging brings condemnation, wrath, a harsh conscious, and a critical attitude towards who we are. This sets up a completion or an adversary relationship between the two like a war happening between two people. A divided self will happen like a war and not accepting of you becomes like an enemy. And when acceptance is not your friend, than failure will have a stronghold in your life and takes a stance in your perception of who you are.

If you are having troubles really viewing acceptance as your friend, than give me a call and allow me to help you shift from feeling like a failure to feeling like acceptance. When acceptance is not your friend, than failure will become normal and you will falsely conclude that you cannot have acceptance and only falsely conclude that failure is the new normal for your life. I would love to help you move from failure to acceptance.