The subject of love has been on my mind since I set out on my journey. Love, a strange emotion that I don’t really understand and unsure if I’ve ever really felt – love – pure, without bitterness or regret, without strings attached or unmet expectations looming in the distance, but love.
The Bible talks about love, Henri Nouwen’s book is all about self-love, and Joyce Meyer speaks about love constantly. Three sources I spend time with regularly, but I never really felt I grasped what it means to purely love and to purely be loved. And not only did I not grasp what it “means” to be loved, to be quite honest, I haven’t felt I was a person who could or should be loved.
I’ve made mistakes. I’ve drank too much and gotten into fierce arguments, sometimes turning physical. I’ve hurt people I really, really loved. Did I love them? How could I love someone, and then hurt them? I’ve been hurt, too. How could someone love me, and then hurt me?
What is love really? My life has been unstable and chaotic, traumatic at times. How is love possible in an environment like this, in a person like me?
I had a really great insight today and experienced one of those moments where you just know God is speaking to your heart. I came home from work and made myself clean up. Cleaning helps me clear my head and relax my thoughts and worries. I was mentally going through imperatives I had read in my Henri Nouwen book and mentally revisiting a recent podcast of Joyce Meyer. And then it hit.
Losing someone’s love does not make me unlovable.
No matter how many failed friendships and breakups with boyfriends, no matter how many people who have left me and took their love with them, no matter what, from the beginning until forever…I am lovable. Me, as a living, breathing individual, I am lovable.
More so, GOD LOVES ME. Unconditionally and without constraints, I am loved by the Creator of the world. He loves me no matter what I do and no matter what I don’t do. And I can come to Him any time with any problem or worry or sin and He will bless me and comfort me and lay peace upon my heart. Simply, all because He loves me.
I am lovable. And I am loved.
Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash
