Bring Another Poop Bag: Confessions of a Recovering People-Pleaser

Education may not be the best field for a people pleaser. But then again, pretty much any and every human experience could be a potential issue for someone like me. Customer service, marriage, even walking the dog. Let me elaborate.

This past week, I took my dog Bandit out for a walk. Immediately upon stepping into my next-door neighbor's lawn, he made a pit stop. I promptly opened the only bag I had brought with me, collected his "present" and set it in my own lawn to be picked up upon our return. About 3/4 of the way through our walk around the neighborhood, Bandit decided he was feeling especially generous and delivered a second "present" in the front yard of one of our neighborhood watch ladies. I was in a quandary. My only pick-up bag was sitting in my front yard about 15 houses away, and even if I left to go get it, I was still leaving it in someone's yard for the 7 minutes or so it would take me to get home and back. As I am standing in this woman's yard, I hear a voice from somewhere I can't identify. "Pick it up," stated as a sort of warning. Not being able to identify the source, I speak into the air about the whole scenario. Can you imaging some crazy girl standing in your front yard, speaking loudly in no particular direction about her dog poop quandary? And this is when I realized I had a problem. Well, actually two problems. One: I had no bag. Two: The people-pleaser in me was growing very nauseous. Someone was mad at me, and the problem needed to be fixed immediately. Not in the 7 minutes it would take me to walk home and back. And so I did the natural thing for a people-pleaser. I found the closest piece of trash I could find, which of course was three sizes too small, and picked up the problem. But I realized that the problem was not the issue of the poo. Or the fact it was all over my hands. It was that someone had been upset with me. And ultimately, it was an issue of my heart.

Who knows if the person saw me pick up the poop or not? She saw that I did not pick it up immediately, and thereby had done wrong, and had scolded me for it. And I realized there was nothing I could do to rectify that. I had been misunderstood! For those of you who are also people-pleasers, can you feel the lump rising in your throat? The rising pulse? That horrendous feeling of guilt and frustration? We spend a lot of time and energy making sure everyone around us is happy with everything we do, and we mess up one time and get called out on it.

As I walked home half ready to cry, I recalled a verse that had stood out to me a few days before from Isaiah 26. Verse 4 says,

"You will keep in perfect peace him whose mind is steadfast, because he trusts in you."

And as I thought about this verse, I thought, "God is not mad at me. He is not scolding me from heaven. And although someone may be upset with me because of a mistake on my part (bring two bags, Stef!!), he is not calling me an idiot. He saw that I wanted to make it right and as far as it depended on me, I tried to live at peace with my neighbors." What more could I have done in the situation?

We trust in God. And we do our best to please God, not men. Which works out well, because usually when we please God, men are pleased, but when they aren't, we can take comfort in God's perfect peace. And so we trust. I must trust God to speak on my behalf when I have extinguished all opportunities to make things right with my neighbor, or the parents who are mad at me at work (I'm a teacher), or the guy who honked at me in traffic.

And we acknowledge that our people-pleasing is an idol that we must stop worshipping. We must take all of our people-pleasing thoughts captive and make them submit to the obedience of God's will, because ultimately, our people-pleasing becomes a source of pride in our lives. Look how our actions lead other people to be pleased with us! Yay us and our social intelligence and attention to others' needs! (See how even very good things can become demented when they become our god?)

And this is an everyday struggle for me. Renewing my mind to focus on pleasing God, who sees all things, and ultimately takes our sorry attempts at goodness into himself and turns them into something that pleases him. And thank Jesus for the cross which makes this righteousness possible.

So be at peace, my people-pleasing peers. Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you as well (Matthew 6:33).

Praise God for the perfect peace that is made available to us through his perfect Son's perfect sacrifice! For what the law could not do, God DID (Romans 8:3)!