Excluded

Did you or do you ever feel excluded?  And especially when you were once seemingly in the center, and then put out to pasture, so to speak, or even felt “dumped.”  Someone who develops a physical limitation, maybe hearing, seeing, or walking, can find that places they went no longer are accessible to them because of their hearing seeing, wheel chair, etc.  But then there are those for whom nothing  physically changed in them, but a new boss came along.  The new boss had different ideas about who would be central and who would be “not so much.”  You ended up the “not so much.”  You felt married to your work or ministry, and someone took it pretty much away.  Well, this is not foreign to me.  Now I could whine, complain, talk behind someone’s back, criticize, but the situation would stay the same, but I would be in a negative mood and emotionally out of balance.  Not good for me.  So what I do is try to think of other people who are feeling or being excluded for whatever reason.  How can I be of some service to make them feel more included and important?  Senior persons would be a place where I could be of service, so this I try to do.  I feel better and find that I have a whole new world of usefulness open up to me.  It is a bit of “do unto others as I would have them do unto me.”  Anyhow, it keeps me out of trouble.