Dealing with Fear of Judgment

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I was reflecting on how much of my thought life is swamped by condemnation. Most of the time it's tied to my interactions with people. Sometimes in group settings I get extremely quiet, and it's because I fear man and fear judgment so much that I just don't speak. And then I condemn myself for it. It's all a vicious cycle that I've never dealt with, and it's even hard for me to admit all this here..but I'm realizing that man's immense brokenness is all necessary for God's glory. If people just saw the wholeness of God's people and the success of their ministries, without the brokenness that was necessary for it, God wouldn't receive much glory. That's why it's necessary to share the ashes as well as the beauty. But anyway, I think the cons of being a good listener are that people share everything with you..incidentally for me, a lot of the time it's the most judgmental thoughts about others. I think I've gotten more insecure over the years as I've seen more and more the viciousness of people's judgments, evidently more than I could handle. It's resulted in me, ironically, judging others to be judgmental..which causes me to shrink back in fear all the time. But instead of assuming people are judgmental, I should see them as Jesus..believing they aren't judging me, but actually have the heart of Jesus to love and accept me. I learned all of this through conversations with sisters this week, so definitely grateful God has spoken to them about this subject. It's gonna take a while for the lesson of "see people as Jesus" to kick in (it's helped in the past few days tho!), so prayers are definitely appreciated:).

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