Setting out the yellow signboard that said, ‘Wet Floor,’ I sloshed my mop between the tables of the café.

Only one table was occupied. A group of about six or seven sat around it sharing bags of chips and bursts of conversation.

I knew all of them. They were my classmates from my graduate program in journalism in upstate New York.

As my mop swished around the floor, I heard them make plans to meet up at a restaurant, or maybe it was the mall, later on that day.

One of them smiled at me as she walked out the door of the café. Another waved goodbye. The others were too wrapped up in conversation as they picked up their backpacks and left. None of them invited me to their little outing that evening or even their conversation at the table.

I remember putting the mop away, washing my hands and taking orders for Turkey melts and Reubens with a smile plastered on my face. But inside I felt the sting of rejection, the prick of invisibility.

They were not mean kids. They were just regular 21-year-olds, more concerned about fitting in and finding friends than reaching out and being a friend. Empathy isn’t typically part of the emotional repertoire of most 20-something-year-olds.

There I was —the immigrant kid (well, more specifically a ‘legal alien’—such a warm, endearing term, wouldn’t you say?), mopping dirty floors, blending into the furniture, donning the disguise of invisibility as do most who quietly clean messes.

Hey, when I lock up the café later tonight, I get to take home cartons of soup that can’t be served tomorrow. Who needs to spend money at a restaurant when you can have free chicken noodle soup three nights in a row?

That’s the story I told myself.

This was back in 2001. I was an eager grad student, anxious to make my mark on the world through print journalism. I was in the US for the first time in my life. In fact, I’d left India for the first time in my life.

I was sure it was going to be a grand adventure. I was also sure life would be exactly as if I lived in a sitcom. Like maybe an episode of ‘Friends,’ although a tamer version would be perfectly fine with me.

Experiencing rejection was not part of the game plan. Well, being left out is never part of anyone’s agenda, is it?

Twenty years later,  I’m all grown up. But I’ve discovered that you don’t always outgrow the need to be seen. That being excluded can be painful.

I don’t know anyone who has not been forgotten, not been iced out, not been glossed over, not been overlooked.

It happens to all of us. Even the “popular” ones, the ones who seem to “fit in” wherever they go, the ones who are the life of the party—yeah, even the cool people are not immune from experiencing rejection at some point in their lives.

But when I added, “you’re in excellent company” as part of the title of this article,  I wasn’t referring to the popular people who are sometimes left out.

I’m talking about a man who experienced rejection from the moment He entered the world.

Though He came to that which was His own, His own did not receive Him. (John 1:11)

He was someone well-acquainted with being brushed aside.

He was known as the one from whom men turned their faces. He experienced being spurned from the moment of his birth to being isolated in the moment of his death.

Friend, I don’t know what kind of rejection you’re facing today.

Maybe it’s something as simple as a party to which you seem to be the only one not invited (that your Instagram stories so kindly informed you about). Maybe it runs deeper and it’s being rejected in a relationship that you had counted on.

When that happens, our defense mechanism goes into overdrive. We build walls, keep others at arm’s length, put on masks of being invincible and unaffected and invulnerable. We act like we prefer stale chicken noodle soup to hanging out with friends at a restaurant.

But there is One who sees through those masks we expertly put on— right through them to your heart.

And He smiles and reminds you that you’re in excellent company because He’s been there too.

And then He welcomes you in. He pulls up a chair.

There’s always room for you at His table.

 

As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him—  you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house. 1 Peter 2: 4