This is the second installment in my series, The Things We Were Never Meant to Carry, and I think this particular burden has worn out more people than we realize because it can follow us everywhere while remaining almost completely invisible.
I have heard the old saying for years, “What other people think about you is none of your business.”
The older I get, the more wisdom I hear in it, provided we understand it through the lens of Scripture rather than using it as an excuse to become careless about how we live.
There are times when another person’s criticism should cause us to stop, listen, examine ourselves, and make something right.
We should remain teachable, and if several trustworthy people who love the Lord are pointing toward the same problem in our character, wisdom would tell us to pay attention.
Still, there comes a point where we have to accept something that can feel almost offensive to those of us who have spent years trying to be understood by everyone.
Some people are going to think poorly of you.
They may misunderstand something you did, disagree with a conviction you hold, dislike the way you communicate, or simply find your personality difficult.
There will be people who interpret confidence as arrogance, reserve as coldness, kindness as weakness, boundaries as rejection, conviction as judgment, and an ordinary difference of opinion as something deeply personal.
You can spend an enormous portion of your life attempting to correct every one of those interpretations, and if you are determined to succeed, you will eventually exhaust yourself because human opinion has no finish line.
Paul asked a question in Galatians 1:10 that leaves very little room for a life governed by the approval of others:
“For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.”
That verse illustrates the desire to please people can disguise itself as something much more respectable.
We tell ourselves that we simply want everyone to understand, we want them to know our heart.
We want the family to recognize why we made the decision.
We want the people at church to know the whole story because surely, if they had every detail, they would arrive at the same conclusion we did.
Sometimes they still will not.
That is difficult for those of us who have an almost physical discomfort with being misunderstood.
I think our culture has made this burden heavier because we now live in an age where everybody has an opinion and almost everybody has a place to publish it.
People who have never sat across a table from us can form conclusions from one paragraph, one photograph, one comment, one political opinion, or one fragment of our life.
We can know within minutes whether strangers approve of something we said, and if we are not careful, that constant exposure to feedback can begin training us to measure ourselves by reaction.
Approval becomes addictive because it feels like confirmation.
Disapproval becomes frightening because it feels like rejection.
Eventually we may begin adjusting ourselves before anyone has even objected.
That kind of living can make a person strangely divided inside.
You are always thinking about how you are being received while trying to live the life God has actually placed in front of you.
And this does not happen only online.
Some of the strongest pressure comes from people whose opinions matter to us precisely because we love them.
Extended family has a way of exposing this in ways strangers never could.
Maybe you grew up in a family where everybody was expected to live close, celebrate every holiday the same way, hold similar opinions, raise children according to familiar traditions, and remain deeply involved in one another’s lives.
Then adulthood came and somebody married, moved, changed churches, homeschooled, stopped homeschooling, chose a different career, developed stronger convictions, loosened old family customs, or simply became a different adult than relatives expected.
Suddenly an ordinary adult choice can be interpreted as a statement about everybody else.
If you do Christmas differently, someone may decide you think their way is wrong.
If you establish a boundary around your time, somebody may believe you have become selfish.
If your marriage becomes your primary earthly relationship, a parent or sibling may struggle with the access they once had changing.
If you raise your children differently from the way you were raised, relatives may hear criticism even when none was spoken.
Family relationships carry years of history, which means one person’s growth can unsettle an entire system.
Sometimes people prefer the version of you who needed their approval.
They knew how to relate to that version; they knew how to subtly control that version of you.
When you become more settled in your convictions, more willing to make decisions without polling everyone first, or more comfortable saying, “This is what we believe is right for our family,” that change may create tension in relationships where you once played the role of peacemaker, agreeable child, compliant sibling, or person who never made anybody uncomfortable.
There are times when you will need to listen carefully because growth can become stubbornness if we refuse correction.
There are other times when the tension simply means you are no longer allowing everybody else’s preferences to make your decisions.
Learning to tell the difference takes maturity.
I think one of the hardest lessons in adulthood is realizing that being loved and being approved of are not always the same experience.
Someone can love you and still strongly dislike a choice you made.
Family and friends can share years of history and eventually discover that their convictions, priorities, or lifestyles have taken different directions.
Those differences can hurt without making either person evil.
Sometimes personalities simply clash.
I wish we allowed more room for that.
There are people with whom conversation flows easily, while another person may grate on us within fifteen minutes despite having done nothing objectively wrong.
Temperaments differ.
Humor differs.
We can turn personality differences into moral judgments if we are not careful.
There may be perfectly decent people who do not particularly like you.
There are also people who dislike something about your life because it touches something unresolved inside their own.
That is an uncomfortable truth because we should be very cautious about assuming jealousy every time someone criticizes us. That explanation can become a convenient way of protecting our ego from legitimate correction.
Still, envy exists.
Insecurity exists.
There are occasions when another person sees something in your life that reminds them of what they wanted, what they lost, what they regret, or what they have been unwilling to pursue.
Sometimes people tear down what makes them feel exposed.
You may never know when that is happening.
And that is part of why trying to manage every opinion is such a hopeless burden.
You do not know the entire history behind another person’s judgment of you.
You do not know what part of their reaction comes from you and what part comes from something much older.
You cannot crawl inside their mind and edit the version of you that lives there.
At some point, you have to let God be God over another person’s thoughts regarding you.
First Corinthians 4:3-4 has become increasingly precious to me as I get older:
“But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man's judgment: yea, I judge not mine own self. For I know nothing by myself; yet am I not hereby justified: but he that judgeth me is the Lord.”
Paul understood that human judgment, including his own judgment of himself, was limited.
That does not make accountability unnecessary.
It puts accountability in the proper order.
There is only One who knows every motive without needing the story explained.
God knows whether I was trying to hurt somebody.
He knows whether the conviction I held came from Scripture or pride.
He knows whether I made the decision prayerfully or selfishly.
He knows whether I apologized sincerely.
He knows what happened in the conversation when everybody else heard only one version.
There is something deeply freeing about bringing yourself honestly before God and asking Him to search what other people cannot see.
If I am wrong, I want Him to show me.
If pride has blinded me, I want it exposed.
If I have wounded someone, I want enough humility to make it right.
Then, once I have dealt honestly with what belongs to me, I cannot spend the rest of my life trying to control the verdict of every person watching.
That burden belongs somewhere else.
Proverbs 29:25 says, “The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the LORD shall be safe.”
A snare traps.
That is what living for human approval eventually does.
You begin with a reasonable desire to be respected, understood, and liked, and somewhere along the way you discover that your freedom has been shrinking because too many people have been given veto power over your life.
You cannot obey every opinion because the opinions contradict one another.
If we tried to become whatever everyone wanted, there would eventually be nobody left underneath all those expectations.
The question has to become simpler.
Am I pleasing God?
That question will still require humility because we are remarkably capable of calling our own desires God’s will when it suits us.
This is why Scripture matters, prayer matters, a sound church matters, and wise counsel matters.
Yet after those things have been honestly considered, there comes a point where obedience has to matter more than reputation.
Jesus Himself was misunderstood, falsely accused, criticized, rejected, and spoken against.
If a completely sinless life did not produce universal approval, I am probably wasting my time expecting mine to.
That realization has helped me loosen my grip on something I never had control over anyway.
I still care what people think.
I suspect I always will to some degree because I am human, and relationships matter to me.
There are opinions that can still wound me more deeply than I wish they could.
There are people I would desperately prefer to understand my heart.
There are moments when I catch myself mentally preparing a defense for a conversation that may never happen.
I am learning, slowly, to recognize that impulse and ask whether the explanation is truly needed or whether I am once again trying to carry another person’s opinion of me.
Sometimes conviction says have the conversation.
Sometimes love says clear up the misunderstanding.
Sometimes humility says apologize because they saw something in you that you did not see yourself.
And sometimes wisdom says leave it alone.
Allow them to think what they think.
Live faithfully anyway.
Because there is a terrible cost to spending a whole life proving yourself to people.
You begin offering evidence nobody asked for, defending decisions that do not require public approval, and allowing people who carry no responsibility for your calling to hold enormous power over your peace.
At some point, you have to go home and live your life.
You have to love your spouse, raise your children, serve the Lord, do your work, keep your conscience tender, and let God deal with the places you cannot reach.
I think that old quote is becoming truer to me with age.
“What other people think about me is none of my business.”
Perhaps I would add one thing.
What God thinks about me is very much my business.
His approval should matter more than applause, family consensus, online reaction, or the opinion of somebody who has already decided they do not like me.
We need to stop asking whether everybody else approves and begin asking whether we can stand before God with a clear conscience.
Everyone’s opinion of you was never yours to carry.
Your responsibility is far more serious and, in some ways, far simpler: live honestly before the God who already knows the whole story.
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