Answer: When faced with failure and ignored by people, you feel despair about your life. About this question, I’d like to share my understanding, and hopefully it can be helpful to you. It is because of our pride that we feel such pain. Everyone wants to excel and be admired by others. So when we can’t achieve this, we’ll feel disappointed and miserable. Besides, in many cases, the failures we think of are caused by our worldly viewpoints. For example, we think that we need to be highly educated, to have a good job, a beautiful appearance, or to be eloquent or powerful to be highly regarded. People think this is the meaning of success, so they pursue these goals with all their might. But what does it bring to people by pursuing these things? I have a neighbor. He used to do business honestly. But he didn’t earn very much and was afraid to be looked down upon by others, so he started to follow the hidden rules in business. Later he made some money, and he is highly regarded by people around, but his conscience reproaches him and he lives in pain. One of my classmates, in order to be highly regarded by people, found a rich husband. But her husband doesn’t take her seriously, and cheats on her. This marriage makes her very miserable. From this we can see that when people pursue according to the worldly views, no matter whether they can be highly regarded by others or not, they are equally in pain.
In reality, as long as we look at things based on God’s words, it’s not difficult to get rid of these pains. There is one brother from our church. Before believing in God, he was very disappointed because he is plain looking and short. So he studied hard in order to change his future and be successful. But he wasn’t able to be admitted into college. Later he pinned his hopes on finding a good job, but eventually just found a job that he thought very ordinary. During holidays when family and friends gathered together, he would feel he lost face, and felt his life was a failure. After believing in God, he found the root of his pains in God’s words. God says, “Because people do not recognize God’s orchestrations and God’s sovereignty, they always face fate defiantly, with a rebellious attitude, and always want to cast off God’s authority and sovereignty and the things fate has in store, hoping in vain to change their current circumstances and alter their fate. But they can never succeed; they are thwarted at every turn. This struggle, which takes place deep in one’s soul, is painful; the pain is unforgettable; and all the while one is frittering away one’s life. What is the cause of this pain? Is it because of God’s sovereignty, or because a person was born unlucky? Obviously neither is true. At bottom, it is because of the paths people take, the ways people choose to live their lives.” “There is a simplest way to free oneself from this state: to bid farewell to one’s former way of living, to say goodbye to one’s previous goals in life, to summarize and analyze one’s previous lifestyle, view of life, pursuits, desires, and ideals, and then to compare them with God’s will and demands for man, and see whether any of them is consistent with God’s will and demands, whether any of them delivers the right values of life, leads one to a greater understanding of the truth, and allows one to live with humanity and human likeness. When you repeatedly investigate and carefully dissect the various goals of life that people pursue and their various different ways of living, you will find that not one of them fits the Creator’s original intention when He created humanity. All of them draw people away from the Creator’s sovereignty and care; they are all pits into which humanity falls, and which lead them to hell. After you recognize this, your task is to lay aside your old view of life, stay far from various traps, let God take charge of your life and make arrangements for you, try only to submit to God’s orchestrations and guidance, to have no choice, and to become a person who worships God.” Through reading God’s words, he understood that his pains were not caused by his plain appearance or low level of education, even less by his ordinary job, but because he chose a wrong path. Those wrong ideas and views, like pursuing to be looked up to by others and to be superior to others, made him dissatisfied with his situation and fall into endless pain. To solve the pain, he had to get rid of the worldly pursuit and viewpoint. Only by looking at things based on God’s words, knowing God’s sovereignty and submitting to God’s orchestrations, could he gradually be relieved from the pain.
When he was constantly seeking, he suddenly realized that it’s not worth it to feel pain just because others don’t think highly of him. Though his appearance is ordinary, he is a decent and upright person. Isn’t this good? Though he doesn’t have a job that can satisfy his vanity, his current job can help him make ends meet, and still leave him enough time for having fellowship and reading God’s words. Isn’t this God’s blessing? Outwardly, his living condition is average, but this keeps him from following the evil trends, and he feels peaceful in mind. Isn’t this the greatest happiness? After understanding these, he was much more released. Later, he read some God’s words related to his state, and realized that it’s not a meaningful life to pursue to be looked up to by others. Because God’s will is not for us to try to be great, or exceptional, or above others, but to be a person who can listen to God’s words, and live out the likeness of a real person according to God’s requirements, and eventually can achieve knowing God and obeying God. This is the most meaningful life.
From God’s words and this brother’s experience, we can see that without understanding the truth, man cannot get rid of these pains. We have to come before God and tell God our difficulties, and look at things according to God’s words, according to the truth. Only in this way can our problems be solved.