Why Are People So Mad at Me When I'm Just Doing What God Called Me to Do?

By Angela D. Thomas, DrPH, MPH, MBA

They're not mad at you. They're mad at your assignment. When you're walking in what God actually called you to do, opposition isn't a sign that something went wrong. It comes with the job, and once you see that, you can stop pouring your energy into making it stop and put it back where it belongs.

Let me guess how your week went. You did the thing God told you to do. You showed up, you served, you stepped out on the assignment. And somebody had something to say about it. Somebody who used to clap got real quiet. Somebody started rolling their eyes at the very thing God told you to build. And now here you are, losing sleep, replaying it in your head, spending your good time and half your phone calls venting about why she always got something to say.

I want to take that weight off you today, because I think you've been carrying the wrong thing. You've been carrying the offense when God only ever asked you to carry the assignment.

Before we go further, let me define what we're even talking about. When I say opposition, I mean the whole umbrella of it. The haters. The jealousy. The envy. The backbiting. The people who are quietly displeased with what you're doing and the ones who are loud about it. All of it lives under one roof, and all of it is aimed at the same target.

Why Does Doing the Right Thing Make People Come Against You?

Because there is a real enemy with a real strategy, and he almost always works through people. John 10:10 (NKJV) says, "The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly." Look at both halves of that verse, because we love to quote the first part and skip the second. Jesus came so you could have life, and not just barely-getting-by life, but life more abundantly. And the thief's entire job is to make sure you never get to the abundant part.

Then 1 Peter 5:8 (NKJV) tells you how he moves. "Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour." Kill. Steal. Destroy. Devour. That's the whole mission statement in four words, and what he is hunting is not really you. It's the assignment God put on your life. The haters and the side comments are just the delivery method. So the question has to change. It stops being why are they doing this to me, and it becomes what are they actually after. And the answer is always the same. They're after the assignment.

Stop Spending Your Best Energy on Your Worst Critics

Here's where a lot of us get it twisted, and I need you to sit with the math. Say your reach is ten people. About eight of them love you and champion you, and two of them are going to hate no matter what you do. Now grow it. A hundred people, and about twenty are mad. A thousand, and two hundred have something to say. Ten thousand, and now it's two thousand people who don't like you. The haters scale right along with the blessing. That is not a sign you're doing something wrong. That is a sign your reach is growing.

But watch how we behave with those numbers. Most of us spend eighty percent of our energy on the twenty percent who can't stand us. We give the two haters our whole attention, our whole group chat, and our whole prayer time, while the eight people who actually need what God gave us get whatever's left over. That is wasted energy, honey. It's going to happen no matter what you do, so trying to make it stop is like trying to talk the sun out of coming up in the morning.

And let me name the sneakiest version of it. The copycat. Somebody watches what you're doing and decides to do their own version of it, and it gets all up under your skin, because now you're wondering if she's only doing it because she saw you. If somebody stood up tomorrow and said they were starting the Kingdom Building She Shed too, I would have to make a decision right there on the spot, and the decision is this. I can't care. I cannot spend the assignment God gave me trying to police who is watching me and why. Neither can you. Keep your head down and stay focused on what God asked you to do.

And hear me, redirecting that energy isn't the same as pretending the opposition doesn't sting. It does. But there's a big difference between feeling it for a second and building your whole life around it. The assignment is the point. The haters are just the noise. Don't you dare let the noise become the thing you organize your days around. God didn't wake you up this morning to manage your critics. He woke you up to do the work.

What This Means for You

Where are you spending energy trying to win over people who were never going to clap for you, and what would change today if you gave that same energy to the actual assignment God handed you?

This is the first post in a five part series called Why THEY Mad, where we walk through what the Bible says about haters, jealousy, and how to handle opposition without losing yourself in it. Next up, why the opposition seems to get worse right when things finally start going right.

I teach God's Word weekly inside the SheShed Community, and this is exactly the kind of teaching that hits different when you're in the room for it. The replay of this teaching, "Why THEY Mad," is available inside the community as well. Come sit with us.