LOVE
God is a God of love. That’s a given. All throughout scripture, He reminds us of it. His love for us. His love for all people. Our love for Him. Our call to love others.
That is not an easy lesson to learn for most people. Choosing to love God is hard. Choosing to love ourselves is hard. Choosing to love others is hard. Sometimes we struggle with one of these and sometimes we struggle with all of these. More often than not, we think we are doing well in all of these. I’m not saying we aren’t.
You know when a child tries to do something by themselves and they come to you all proud and excited to show you what they’ve done but whatever they’ve done is not right. You are proud of them for trying and impressed at their ability to imitate your actions, but it’s just not right. So you have to fix it for them, or at least show them again how it should be done. That’s what happens with us and God about love.
God loves us so much. That’s a very stereotypical statement. Every tract ever left at a restaurant has that plastered across the top. ‘JESUS LOVES YOU NOW LOVE HIM BACK.’
Accepting love and loving in return is not that easy. It can take a lifetime to even begin to understand how to love God and accept His love.
The other night I had a weird dream. I debated for a while whether it was a dream or an out-of-body experience. In this dream, I was laying in a hammock. That was my tell that it was a dream. Anyways, I was laying in a hammock doing worship team time (WarP does team time in our sleep amirite). I was in a state of complete bliss. I was praying and I asked: “God, fill me with your love.” And He did. It was warm, yes. It was joyous, yes. But it hurt. It hurt every ounce of my being. I was laying in this hammock crying because God’s love is so ridiculous that it hurts Him and it will hurt us to live it out.
God’s love is boundless. It is everlasting. He loves us even when we absolutely don’t deserve it. He is ever pursuing. That means when we tell Him we don’t need Him anymore, He knows we do and He won’t let us walk off without the promise of love to run back to when we see we need Him too. It does not matter what we have ever done, He will ALWAYS love us with the same love He has. A heart-warming, over-bearing, painfully extravagant love. It is always given to us without condition; we just have to accept it.
To accept God’s love, we have to love ourselves. This is often times where we come to God with our shoes on the wrong feet and our shirt halfway on and backward.
During my “lost year,” as I not-so-lovingly call it, I developed a LOT of self-loathing. Quite honestly my self-loathing and desire to feel loved and accepted has been brewing for about 10 years. Since I was 9 in elementary school. The more I begin to truly love myself, the more He reveals to me where my struggles began and what drove them. I tried to pull myself out of that self-loathing after my lost year, and I genuinely thought I had. No doubt I had done a fairly good job of attempting.
It’s like if you broke something and then just wrapped it in a ton of duck tape. It didn’t actually fix anything, but it holds it all together and gives the appearance of being fixed. That’s what I had done with loving myself. I had wrapped it in gym addictions, vegetarianism, and a mentality that nothing bothered me.
God ripped that duck tape REAL QUICK at the start of the race as my methods of holding it together were stripped from me. We cannot truly love ourselves until we love God and truly allow Him to show us our worth. Then He shows us how to love ourselves. Because we as humans don’t deserve love. That seems contradictory, but it’s true. We are not worthy of love. But God, so rich in mercy, sent His Son so that our sins would be non-existent. When God sees us, He doesn’t see our sin. He sees an innocent child and loves us without reason.
If we believe every word in scripture, as Christians should, that includes when God tells us how loved we are. That includes when God tells us we are enough. To grow closer to God is to learn to love yourself because He tells you how amazing you are. And God never ever ever lies.
When you love God, you begin to love yourself. When you do both of these, then you begin to love other people. Loving other people is really really hard.
We have to completely die to all of our own selfishness and desires in order to love others. We have to love others the way they need to be loved. We have to love others even when we may not think they deserve love.
Showing love can look different by person and by situation. Sometimes it’s speaking hard truths over our friends. Sometimes it’s a kind word to a stranger. Sometimes it is giving everything we have to other people. Sometimes it’s just listening to people. Sometimes it’s seeding your position in an argument, even if you know deep down you’re right.
Loving people is the hardest thing to do in my opinion. We can have a checklist of ways to love people, but that means nothing if your heart isn’t in it.
Only two things in this world will last forever. God and people. People will last forever in the afterlife, where they last is their own choice. But when we realize that NOTHING else other than those two things will last, it is much easier to give of our time, energy, money, and literally anything else we have.
HATE
The scriptures talk constantly about love because that’s who God is. But God also experiences hate. It’s a righteous hatred. It is not at any person or tangible thing. The only thing God hates is sin.
Scripture tells us that where sin is, God cannot dwell. God hates sin because that is what keeps His children from Him. God is teaching me to hate sin.
Many, many times God has brought me to a point of breaking out in tears because I have so much hatred for sin. I hate the sin that still lingers in me. I hate the sin that is a part of my human nature. I hate the sin that I see in other people. I hate seeing other people sin. But don’t be confused, I love the people. My love for these people is what causes me to hate the sin in them.
My hatred of sin, makes me want to love people more. I want people to be released of this. It’s like when people like country music. They don’t know that there is better out there for them. I don’t hate the people, because they don’t know any better than to like country. So out of love, I show them that there is WAY better music. That’s kinda how it is with sin.
(I’m only kidding for my country folk from Loganville that are reading this. I have many friends who like country music and I pray for them constantly.)
Love and hate are really hard concepts to grasp. It takes quite a long time. For most people, we will spend our entire lives continuing to battle ourselves to learn what it is to love God well, love ourselves well, and love others well. Hating sin is something that is truly a gift from God and only He can give it to you. But you must also know how to steward the hate well. Knowing when to express the hatred, when it is righteous hatred, and when to give grace.
Thank you for reading my blog! I hope you loved it a lot!
Life Update
Our amazing ministry host Tarina took us to Cape Town for a few days!
It was an 8-hour car ride and it was very hot. Our first night Melina and I went to dessert night with Tarina’s family. 35 Rand for as much dessert as your heart desires. I threw up from eating more dairy in one night than in the past year and a half combined. Absolutely worth it. We stayed with Tarina’s family in Paarl.
On Thursday we went into Cape Town. We took a red bus tour all over town and saw so many beautiful things! I really wish I could remember all of the things but all I can say is it was BEAUTIFUL! Also, I pet a seal!
On Friday we went to some places around Paarl. We went to Babelstoren which is a garden full of beautiful flowers, fruit, and vegetables. In this garden, you can eat anything! I had so many amazing fruits and veggies. I tried a prickly pear from a cactus. Terrible idea. Never again. Then we went to an alpaca coffee shop and I pet alpacas! For dinner, we had a cookout at Tarina’s aunt’s house.
On Saturday Tarina had a tea party to attend so we ran a 5k! This is the only 5k I’ve ever run and maybe it won’t be my last. We then went to a really cute market before beginning our voyage home. We saw elephants and zebras and baboons and lots of other fun animals!
