Fear of Missing Out - By Eileen Lynch

We’ve all been there before, you see a post, a picture, a Snap, a text, of all of your closest friends hanging out —without you.  With the advent of so many ways to be connected to the people we care for most through social media and other forms of communication, it is easier than ever to feel the fear of missing out. The initial sense of shock wears off and you find yourself feeling alone, questioning the intentions of people who you thought to be your friends. As someone who has felt this way so many times, I can tell you from experience that it stinks. In the moments after, it is so easy to jump to conclusions, to blame yourself, to ask yourself ‘am I not good enough?’, ‘not funny enough’, to question the authenticity of your friendship. It is normal to feel pain upon being excluded, you have every right to be upset, but it is so incredibly important to know that none of this is your fault.

​You were created as a child of God, in the image and likeness of God, with your gifts and traits bestowed upon you by Him so that others may come to see Him in His glory. You are not responsible for changing your appearance, your personality, or anything else that makes you undeniably you, just to be able to ‘blend in’, nor can you expect to be able to change someone else’s flaws. So often after being ignored, I acted as if their actions did not hurt, and continued to encourage them to hang out with me, in the hopes that they would see me as someone who could fit into their group. That desire to please others and fit in, I soon noted, was beginning to take precedence over my desire to know and please God. Often, we feel a deep pain in our hearts upon being rejected or ignored, an emptiness that feels as if once again, we are deemed to be not good enough. This void is meant to be interpreted as a call from God, a way of Him letting you know that He is ready and willing to enter into your heart and fill the void in order to heal the emptiness.

In those times of recovering from loneliness, it is easy to feel utterly alone and as if no one could ever possibly understand what it feels like to be wronged, or rejected, or ignored—WRONG! Jesus knows exactly how you feel. Denied three times and left to suffer on the cross, He rose again. And you will too. 

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