Made for Each Other

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter;

and those who matter don’t mind.”

Dr. Seuss

We tend to think of the term “made for each other” as purely romantic. But I believe we can broaden the definition in the following way. God created certain people to be important in our lives. These people were made for us and we were made for them. In other words, part of God’s plan for the human race is to create a support system for all of us. God created certain people who would be there for us to help us grow into being the people we were created to be, and to help us accomplish our intended purposes in life. And, likewise, we were created with the intent of being part of a support system for specific others in our lives. Everyone’s support system includes parents, siblings, extended family members, friends, neighbors, love partners and God.

In this light, there are many people in our lives that the phrase “made for each other” can apply to in an essential way. The challenge for us is to weed-through the many people who we encounter in our lives in order to understand who is made for us and who is not. How do we do this? By simply being real; by being our real, true, one of a kind selves we will attract all of the right people. 

Unfortunately, many of us are not willing to explore our real, true selves one on one with ourselves, much less with others. We are so afraid that we will discover that our real selves are not good enough. Believing we are not good enough is pure insanity. Everyone in this world is good enough. It is impossible under God’s plan for anyone to not be “good enough.” We are all purely one hundred percent good enough for the people who were created to be part of our support system.

In facing the world, we are given two choices throughout our lives. We can be our true selves—embracing all that we consider positive and negative about ourselves— and thus attract the “right” people who are part of the support system God created for us; or we can deny our true selves— rejecting all that we consider negative about ourselves (and thus rejecting much of the positive as well)— and create a false persona to “hide” our negatives. 

In choosing the latter, we attract all of the “wrong” people and we attract misery into our lives. When we choose to be false, we attract no one God created to be part of our support system. Think about it. The people who were created to be significant parts of our lives won’t recognize the false persona we’re projecting to the world. And these are the people who are willing to accept our dark sides— all of the negatives-- as well as our light sides. In choosing to put on a false persona, which many of us do out of fear of rejection, we end up alienating all of the right people while attracting all of the wrong people.

This leaves us wasting valuable time trying to change ourselves to please people we will never be able to please when we could be relaxing into our true selves with people who will love us for being our true selves. What sense does that make? Absolutely none. So then why are we often times making-over our natural God-given images in favor of false selves that match the images of toxic people? Why are we creating misery for ourselves instead of being our real selves for those who won't mind?

Dr. Seuss was more than just a children's story writer. His wisdom cuts across all age groups. Let's choose to be who we truly are and attract those who "don't mind" into our necessary circle of support; remembering that those who do mind don't matter. Every step we take toward being our true God-given selves allows our souls to shine!