I have always struggled with my identity: where I find my worth and my confidence. I have always looked for it in the wrong places and been discouraged by the outcome. Most of my life, I looked to my friends and the people I was surrounded by to tell me who I am. I sought approval and validation from them. That was how I felt loved: being accepted and wanted by a certain group and by certain people. I would do anything for approval and acceptance. I defined myself by how widely I was accepted by others. It was how I gauged my worth, my value. The more people that I could say loved me, the more worthy I was of being loved. If those people don’t like something about me, I better change it to keep their love. If those people want me to do something, I better do it to earn their love. but thats the thing, love shouldn’t have to earned. It shouldn’t have to be received to be given in return. I have loved others for the sole purpose of being loved, or at least feeling loved, in return. But the Lord has revealed to me that that isn’t the kind of love He wants for me or the kind of love that He has for me.
After living with the same eight people for two months, moving into a house with 50 other people was quite a transition for me. In this transition, I found myself completely changing who I was and who I had become in the past 2 months. Living with so many people has been overwhelming at times for me personally. I put a lot of pressure on myself to impress other people, to be an “extrovert”, to give them a reason to like me and want to be around me. And it was exhausting. I was constantly worried about what I should and shouldn’t say or what I should and shouldn’t do. I was scared of doing something that might give people a reason to reject me. I was living and acting out of fear of rejection, and I know that that fear was not from God. “For God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power and love and self-control.” (2 Timothy 1:7)
I have been asking Him a lot lately, to tell me who I am and what He wants me to do and strive to be. And one day He revealed to me that I will never be able to figure out who He created me to be if I keep trying to be who I think everyone else wants me to be. I was not created to be loved by creation; I was created to be loved by the Creator.
so for the past month I have been living in crazy cool freedom. Freedom to be authentically myself and, for the first time, genuinely not caring what others think of me. In this new freedom though, I have found myself crossing from not caring about what people think, to having a difficult time caring about people. I have allowed myself to show my frustration with people. I have been easily irritated and angered. I have been selfish and entitled. I have been so determined to be authentic and real all the time, and not hold back what it is I want to say, or hide what I feel, that I have lacked self-control and not been showing love. I was speaking freely, even if my words were negative or had a negative impact. I was only worried about myself, not the people around me. And I realized that worrying about what people think is vastly different from being considerate of how I made others feel. My words were powerful. They were affecting my relationships and the atmosphere I was in. I was genuinely struggling to not only show love to the people around me, but to actually love them.
so I decided to study love.
Most of you are probably familiar with 1 Corinthians 13, (if not from the Bible, than certainly from that one Miley Cyrus song):
“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on it’s own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing; but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” Verses 1-8
I had been asking the Lord why it was that I was so easily annoyed and so insistent on doing what I wanted to do, when I wanted to do it. Why I was filled with so much anger. And it was because I didn’t have love. I was not striving to be patient, or kind. I was not rejoicing in truth. Love is active, ad I was not acting in that love. I was not acting out of love. I was not speaking in love. I was neither giving nor accepting love. I was focused on taking advantage of the new freedom I had in Christ. And I used that freedom to benefit myself; I used it as an excuse to do and say what I wanted, when I wanted, because I wasn’t trying to please anyone. i kept the freedom of the Lord to myself, when I am called to give it away to others, to use it to lift others up, serve others, and love others (Galatians 5:13)..
it seems like common sense, loving people. like it comes naturally and you shouldn’t have to think about it. but the truth is, that in this world full of sin, it is incredibly difficult to love people. to put others before yourself. it goes against our nature as human beings, born into sin. we were raised in a culture that promotes selfishness. that says that success is the only way to find happiness. so yeah, loving people is extremely difficult, but it is the most rewarding and fulfilling thing you can do on this earth, and it is the reason we are here in the first place. we are here to love, not to be loved. we are already so immensely loved by the Father, that we don’t need to seek it out from the world. but the Father calls us to love His children. He tells us to love like He loved. to show His supernatural love to the world.
The Lord gave me, and you, the beautiful freedom to be ourselves. Our true selves, the selves He created us to be. but in order to become the best versions of the people He created us to be, we have to be actively pursuing Christ. and when we are pursuing Christ, we are pursuing love, because Jesus Himself is love. so that is what we should be working toward becoming: love itself. challenge yourself the way the Lord has been challenging me: Let all that you do be done in love (1 Corinthians 16:14)
