Just when I think I have mastered loving people, God calls me to walk, learn and go deeper in the area of Love. It’s a stretching proccess but one I am willing to go. He never promised it to be easy, He never said there wouldn’t be trials or obsticles. In fact, I have had to pull knives out of my back several times from folks God told me to LOVE… I cant be responsible for what a person does with the love that I give, I am just responsible for demonstrating, activating and releasing this Love and trusting God to do with it at his will.
The journey to loving is far from over for me in fact, it just started on the right path about a year ago for me… Being in dead end relationships most my life caused me to have a “fuzzy image” of what REAL LOVE is all about. Yeah, sure I knew what real love was but other than experiencing this REAL LOVE from my Heavenly Father, I had yet experienced it here in “human form”. I have learned it is very hard for the average person to walk in this REAL LOVE because of many reasons…It isn’t until we open our hearts first to receive God and his love for us that we can begin to open our hearts to release or receive LOVE from people.
Everyone has a love language that they speak learning that language is a very important key in receiving and activating love in our lives. I have learned my love language may be way different than the one that I am to pour out my love to therefore, I must learn their love language so that I can see that my love is indeed being accepted/rejected and when love is being poured into my life (after all we all speak a different love language).
Now, note that I am talking about love in many forms, from God to us, from us to God, to us from others (friends) or from a spouse to a spouse. Yes, God wants us to love our friends, He even wants us to love our enemies…Imagine that, loving someone who “hates you”!
I believe that we all have this dark underestimation of ourselves. Sometimes it is masked as arrogance, overestimation, superiority, but underneath the brashness he problem is insecurity and only unqualified, unmerited, unconditional love can assuage it.
I also believe, the Lord does not look so much at the magnitude of anything we do as at the love with which we do it. If we accomplish what we can, His Majesty will see to it that we become able to do more each day. We must not begin by growing weary; but during the whole of this short life, which for any one of you may be shorter than you think, we must offer the Lord whatever interior and exterior sacrifice we are able to give Him, and His Majesty will unite it with that which He offered to the Father for us upon the Cross, so that it may have the value won for it by our will, even though our actions in themselves may be trivial.
I have learned along this journey that:
Love is an act of endless forgiveness.
If we want the advantages of love, then we must be willing to take the risks of love. And that requires vulnerability. Of course, we can refuse this path and trod another one devoid of openness. But the toll on such a road is extremely high.
It is wonderful how the exercise of one's will in a matter like this will eventuate in the correct emotions. Determining to wish that person's good; deliberately trying to do something loving for him; and praying for him - all this will some day bring about the emotion of love itself. But love, as the Bible interprets it, is an affair of the will, not necessarily of the emotions.
Our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner - no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.
Open your hearts to the love God instills... God loves you tenderly. What He gives you is not to be kept under lock and key but to be shared.
Faith tolerates a moderate love of ones fellow man no more than it tolerates a moderate love between God and man.
Instead of allowing yourself to be unhappy, just let your love grow as God wants it to grow. Seek goodness in others. Love more persons more... love them more impersonally, more unselfishly, without thought of return. The return, never fear, will take care of itself.
The way to love someone is to lightly run your finger over that person's soul until you find a crack, and then gently pour your love into that crack.
The proof that you love someone is not that you have warm affectionate feelings toward them. The proof is in your actions, your words and your sacrifice, your willingness to give the best of yourself and your willingness to get nothing in return.
Christianity is not about ideas but about deeds inspired by love.
Romantic love is blind to everything except what is lovable and lovely, but Christ's love sees us with terrible clarity and sees us whole. Christ's love so wishes our joy that it is ruthless against everything in us that diminishes our joy. The worst sentence Love can pass is that we behold the suffering which Love has endured for our sake, and that is also our acquittal. The justice and mercy of the judge are ultimately one.
There are many who want me to tell them of secret ways of becoming perfect and I can only tell them that the sole secret is a hearty love of God, and the only way of attaining that love is by loving. You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; and just so you learn to love God and man by loving. Begin as a mere apprentice and the very power of love will lead you on to become a master of the art
Love does not inquire into the character of the recipient but it asks what he needs. It does not love him because he is such-and-such a person but because he is there. In all this it is quite the opposite of natural love: it "does not seek its own". It does not perform the characteristic natural impulse of love and life. Therefore it is basically independent of the conduct of the other person; it is not conditional but absolute. It wants nothing for itself but only for others. Therefore it is also not vulnerable. It never 'reacts" but is always "spontaneous", emerging by its own strength - rather, from the power of God. Love is the real God-likeness of man for which he has been created. In so far as love is in man he really resembles God and shows himself to be the child of God.
*Originaly written back in April 2010 and posted on my facebook page.
