Selling Love
It’s February already and inevitably the stores will have their Valentine’s Day displays everywhere, commercials for jewelry and chocolate and cards will flood the radio and TV. Even my social media feeds have been full of bouquets – from flowers, to chocolate, to cookies, to chicken nuggets and bacon wrapped sausages… what?!?
The world is going to try to sell us love and apparently when the flowers and chocolates get old, we’ll create new ways, after all, nothing says I love you like a chicken nugget bouquet, right? Don’t hear that wrong, there is nothing wrong with choosing to show your love and appreciation with any one or all of these things, but as we drown in the noise of what love is supposed to be according to the commercials, and the stress of making sure we make it special, I would just like to use our weekly check-in time to encourage you to stop, silence the noise, and focus on what your heart is needing, wanting, probably even desperately crying out for.
Commandment
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength… Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” Mark 12:30-31 (NIV).
Love Assessment
We are called to love. First God and then others as ourselves. You know that, you’ve heard it, read it, probably repeated it to other people. But, do you live in it? Does it live in you? Is it your reality? Specifically, the hardest part, loving yourself? What do you think of yourself as you sit here today? Do you smile at who you are becoming, do you cry at who you have been? Do you look back on your younger self, whether she is 7, 17 or 70 with grace and mercy or with condemnation and embarrassment. Or do you not look back at all?
Can I challenge you in that for a moment? The way you love yourself will directly impact the way you can love God and others. Your ability to see how lovely you are, how adored and precious and smart and wanted and desired you are, is necessary to love God fully and to love others well. When our love flows out of the unhealthy space of striving and earning and coming through, it is tainted with expectations, conditions, and demands. Me too.
Love Her. Love Better.
Let’s do it better this year. Let’s allow God to speak of what He sees in us, of His love for us, and then let’s brave the memory and revisit our younger selves. Can we look back on her with mercy and grace, with understanding, and empathy, and speak life to her. She is beautiful, she is loved, she is a child of the King. She is light and joy and hope. She is wanted and needed. She is seen.
Love Better!