Letting Go Of The Need To Be Accepted

Over the past few years, I have experienced a series of rejections, at least that's what they felt like to me. Before the last incident, God told me I was not going to move forward until I let go of the need to be accepted. I was surprised because I didn't know I had a need to be accepted, but I thought okay that's easy enough. I was wrong it was not as easy as I thought. I have spent the last several months trying to figure out what it means to need to be accepted, why I need it, and how to let go of it. What I learned is that my feelings of rejection started with my father. His absence from my life was my first and most significant rejection, which caused me to feel unacceptable, and every time I experienced a new rejection it aggravated the old wound created by my father and reinforced the feeling that I was unacceptable. But this morning I had an epiphany. I have spent my whole life trying to get people to love me. I've done a lot of things that I am not proud of and made a fool of myself countless times all to get people to accept me. I didn't always realize what I was doing and sometimes I couldn't even control it there was something that just turned on inside of me whenever I was around someone I liked or someone I wanted to be accepted by. If I could just get people to love me then it would mean that I was good enough, that I was okay--that I was acceptable, but God showed me that He never commanded me to get people to love me or to accept me, He commanded me to love them, but because I was so busy trying to get them to love me, I was not truly loving them. There was no way I could be because my goal was not to love but to be loved and that is not how God designed it. I usually end up doing a lot of things I really don't want to do and feeling used in the end because what I'm doing is not really coming from a place of love and the "love" is not being returned. God's design is for me to love others, period. Once I make loving others my goal, He will make sure I am loved in return and if I allow Him to choose how and from whom I receive love, I can let go of the need to be accepted by others and I can rest in the fact that I am accepted in the Beloved.