Can you really love others well if you don’t love yourself?
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t dread this question. My body immediately rolls my eyes back for me.
“You can only love other as much as you love yourself” well, that basically meant that my love was not that deep at all.. not understanding.. not kind.. not existent if I’m being honest.
God has been taking me through this process of showing me who I am to Him. He has done this in a way that shook everything I know. He didn’t show me the pretty things inside me to prove it to me… He didn’t give me a supernatural experience per say where I heard the words “YOU ARE LOVED” coming from the mountains.
It was more of an awkward silence.
You want me to make a list of all the things I love about myself? All the ways I’m beautiful? *Insert any other overused method used to entice emotions*
“Nah, your heart is different this time. I love you too much to only change your emotions… I want to change the blood filled with passiveness and self-loathing thats running through your veins. I don’t want to distract you from who you are and make you avoid all the dark places in your heart. I want to change your structure. The way your bones react to conflict. The way your heart hurts when hit with loneliness. I don’t want to distract you from what your self-hatred.. But I wan’t to sit down with it. Let me spend time with these things that haunt your heart. And soon… you will see how I will make all things new.
I love you and slowly each day I will show you why, will you trust me?”
What happened next?
An awkward silence… kinda like the sigh that comes while you’re crying and somehow your friend finds a way to make you laugh.
1 John 4:15-18 Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.
