What Are You Afraid Of?: Facing Down Your Fears with Faith by David Jeremiah

Author:David Jeremiah [Jeremiah, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christian Life, Spiritual Growth
ISBN: 9781414384238
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2013-09-30T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

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DISAPPROVAL: The Fear of Rejection

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In God I have put my trust; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?

PSALM 56:11

In her time, she was a superstar of the cinema; they didn’t come any more glamorous than Marlene Dietrich. She began her career performing on the stages of Berlin and in the silent films of the 1920s. Her success (and the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany) eventually brought her to Hollywood, where she became a US citizen in 1937. At the height of her career, she commanded $200,000 per film (nearly $2 million in 2013 dollars—small by today’s Hollywood standards, but huge in her day). In 1999, some sixty years after her peak of fame, the American Film Institute named her the ninth-greatest female star of all time. But her true story is as heartbreaking as any film in which she ever performed.

In spite of her success and acclaim, Dietrich was a conflicted soul. She lived for the approval and applause of her adoring public. When she invited guests to her home, she often played for them the recorded ovations of the audiences present at her live performances. No music, no words—just the sounds of cheers and applause. Guests—many of them equally famous—were forced to sit and listen as she identified the cities where the applause was recorded.

During her one marriage, she carried on a string of affairs with leading figures in Hollywood and Washington. Going from man to man, she never found the fulfillment and approval she constantly sought. She even passed on to her husband (who had affairs of his own) the love letters from her paramours to show him how much they adored her.

Dietrich’s life in the spotlight ended in Sydney, Australia, in 1975 when she fell off a stage and broke her thigh. Then, addicted to alcohol and painkillers, she lived her final eleven years in loneliness and seclusion, bedridden in a Paris apartment, refusing to see anyone except a select few.

Marlene Dietrich’s search for approval was amplified by her public visibility, but there was nothing unique about it. Humans are relational beings, and each of us has a built-in longing for approval. It originates deep in the human psyche, where we have embedded the knowledge that we are not what we were created to be. We sense the truth of Romans 3:23, that “all have sinned and [fallen] short of the glory of God.” Believing we have lost God’s stamp of approval, we search elsewhere for affirmation, which leads to dramatic missteps (like those of Marlene Dietrich).

This longing for approval is so strong that we spend our lives chasing it, often sacrificing our values and priorities in an attempt to secure it. As teens, we encounter peer pressure. As young adults, many of us deal with people pleasing. We’ve even invented a specialized form of approval seeking called codependency. But it’s all roughly the same thing. In every age group, there are people who live in self-imposed slavery to others and their opinions.

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