Who are You Trying to Impress?

     When I was in school, I figured out pretty early that the area I could excel in was being the “good one”. I might not have been the smartest one in the class,or the most popular, but I could impress teachers by always doing what they asked and never causing problems. I never had one teacher call me disrespectful until I was a senior in high school, and it bothered me for months. I guess it’s just in my nature to be a people pleaser, because I've carried those habits with me into adulthood.

Last week, I had a painful experience that hurt my feelings in a lot of ways, and also really hurt my "good kid" pride. To put it concisely, I was told that mostly because of one person’s negative perception of me, I would no longer get to do something I really enjoyed, and connections I spent almost four months making would be taken away from me. This news took came as a complete surprise to me, and hasn't been easy for me to process. It would be easy and temporarily satisfying to reveal all of the details and call people out, but I know that would be wrong of me and definitely backfire at some point, and I'm trying very hard not to become bitter, so I won't do that.

Even though several people that I have a lot of respect for reassured me that I had done everything I could and was not at fault in this situation, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I could have done differently to make this person happy. After about a week of coming up with no answer to that question, and through a lot of agonizing and talking it over with friends, I finally came to the conclusion that making any person happy shouldn't even be my goal.

I'm starting to realize that even if I do my absolute best to get everything right, there are just some people who won't be satisfied. As frustrating as that is to me, it serves as a reminder that pleasing God needs to be my focus. Sure, I need to be respectful to people who are in positions above me and try my best to do what I'm expected too, but I shouldn't be so upset when people aren't satisfied, because at the end of the day, and at the end of my life, God is the one who has the final word, and what He thinks about me is really all that matters. I'm sure it's going to be a long process, but I'm ready to start becoming a God pleaser instead of a people pleaser.