"I'm too sensitive and need to toughen up to survive"
How it sounds in your head: Everyone says I take things too personally. I cry at commercials and get hurt by offhand comments. My dad keeps telling me the world will eat me alive if I don't grow thicker skin. Maybe I'm just broken.
"I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh."
-- Ezekiel 36:26World's voice that equates hardness with strength and sensitivity with weakness, opposing the God who calls Himself 'tender and compassionate'
She's been told she's 'too sensitive' since childhood and has watched harder people seem to succeed while her feelings feel like liabilities. Every hurt seems to prove she can't handle real life.
God said to Josiah, 'Because your heart was tender and you humbled yourself before God when you heard His words, I have heard you.' Josiah's sensitivity to God's word brought reformation to an entire nation and delayed judgment on Israel.
I REFUSE the lie that my sensitivity is weakness. IT IS WRITTEN that God removes hearts of stone and gives hearts of flesh - He's making people MORE sensitive, not less. Josiah's tender heart brought reformation to a nation. IT IS WRITTEN that I am blessed when I mourn, blessed when I'm gentle, blessed when I hunger and thirst. My sensitivity allows me to hear God's voice, feel others' pain, and move in compassion like Jesus. The BARAK blessing is on my tender heart because tenderness is strength, and my Father is called 'tender and compassionate' seventy times.
The Father is not trying to toughen you up - He's protecting your tender heart because it's the very thing that makes you most like Him. He's the God who is easily entreated, quickly moved with compassion, and He gave you that heart specifically so you could feel His heartbeat.