Rejection stinks. I want to be accepted, invited, recommended, included. I want someone to say, “Hey, I like what you’re doing; keep doing it.” So when I do the hard work of writing a query letter, putting together my pitch package, and reworking my first ten pages again, only to have a short and sweet rejection letter, it hurts.

I’m not saying that whoever rejected my manuscript at the time didn’t have a good reason. Maybe I needed to rework something. Maybe they wouldn’t be the right advocate for me. I get that there’s a process. Publishing is a journey as much as the writing is.

But rejection still stinks. Especially when what has been rejected is something so intensely personal for me—a decade and a half of dreaming, writing, editing, and awkwardly sharing with people, hoping they don’t hate my life’s work.

So for me to write the phrase, “God of Rejection,” is a little, well, cringy. I don’t like to think of God as the supreme power over something so painful.

But in reality, if God is the supreme power over everything (which he is), then he is also the ruler over, the ordainer of, and the one most deeply understanding of, rejection.

The first two are easier to grasp: if God is in control (which he is), then of course he would choose who gets rejected when, and no one could be rejected without his consent. That’s a comfort, in some sense, that the God who loves me saw fit for me to go through this season of rejection for his own good plan and will.

The last point, however, is not what I usually think of when I think of God as being the Lord of rejection. But it’s still true. God understands rejection better and more intimately than I ever could.

Because while I am rejected once a day, once a week, depending on how often I put myself out in the open enough to be rejected, God is rejected millions of times a day. He has been for millennia, ever since Adam and Eve chose autonomy over him.

God was rejected by his specially-chosen nation of Israel when they wanted a human king instead of him, then rejected by them again when the idols of surrounding nations seemed more interesting. His prophets kept being rejected when they said what God specifically told them to say, and then, when God sent himself, his very Son, Jesus, he was rejected again—so rejected that they killed him.

Even after the resurrection, when Jesus proved to be Lord over life itself, God kept being rejected—by local religious leaders, by foreign religious leaders, by politicians, by passerby, by businessmen, by elite women. The people who proclaimed God’s message were (and are) continually rejected and persecuted, laughed at and cast out. Millions and billions of people have spat in God’s face and said, “No, I don’t want to love you, submit to you, obey you. I don’t want what you have to offer. I don’t want you.”

To say that God understands rejection is perhaps an understatement.

But what God did in the midst of that rejection is the most wonderful hope in all of history. He didn’t stop putting himself out there; he kept offering his friendship, his love. He gave Israel a chance to repent—again, and again, and again. He sent his Son so that those who had wronged him in their rejection of him could be atoned for and forgiven.

I’m not trying to claim that my latest query rejection is nearly as significant as the very story of redemption; my book is not the gospel, and rejection of my writing does not equate to the damnation of someone’s soul.

But I am saying that when I am rejected for the third, fifth, seventy-eighth time, God understands. He doesn’t get mopey about rejection like I do, because he is completely whole and satisfied in himself, not needing anything from his created humans, including our approval or acceptance—but he does understand me in my weakness. And he is with me in my rejection, so that I am not alone.

In my authorial journey, I’m going to face rejection. I’ve already faced it, and it stinks. Unless God has ordained that my next query will lead to the exact agent who will not only accept my book but send it to the exact publisher who will sign a deal and put it in print, to be read by critics who will never say a bad word about my book ever—I will face more rejection. As painful as that is and will be, it’s okay.

I’m coming to realize (though I should have maybe realized it earlier), that God is not as interested in a specific accomplishment as he is about faithfulness. My rejections can be as honoring to him as my acceptance. Perhaps more so.

So, while I want to pretend that the author journey is just a series of steps and I will get my prize at the end if I hit the right buttons—if I get rejected sixty times, then that means I’ve earned being accepted the sixty-first time, right?—I know that God’s plan isn’t so simple. Even if I spend years being rejected, God hasn’t promised that my book will be published. He has promised to love me, to be with me, and to make me look more like his Son.

In light of that, I want to use my rejections for his glory, too. I’m scared to make a claim because it will be so scary to follow through, but, starting now, I want to post something whenever I get a query rejection. Not to simply document the rejections or to emphasize them, but to redeem them. So that when I am tempted to wallow and hide in myself, I point to Christ instead.

I’m scared that, instead of my author’s website being a platform for my books, it will turn into a giant blog of never being published, but I want to hand my fear over to God. If I’m trusting him to publish my book, then I’m trusting him to have it rejected, too.

I hope these posts will be an encouragement to those in a similar journey of rejection, but even more, I hope that they point to the one who has been rejected the most: God, the Creator, Redeemer, Judge, and King. And I hope that, through the work of his Spirit, my journey of rejections makes me look a little more like him.