We All Want To Be Loved

Do you enjoy a good story? I do, especially if it is one where love wins against all odds. Audiences have been held captive with stories about love, whether by the spoken word, read in magazines or books, watched on a screen big or small. Poems have been constructed and recited and songs composed and sung.

We are fascinated by love.

Parts of the world, mainly the western world, goes all out to say “I love you,” on February 14th, St. Valentines Day. Hopefully this is not the only day in the year that we will hear someone tell us “I love you.” Alas for many they have not heard these words spoken to them either in a very long time or ever, let alone on February 14th.

The disheveled woman standing on a street corner asking for food, or the teenager hanging out at the mall with her friends, the well dress career woman with the perfect manicure or the tired young mother. Which one would you choose as the unloved?

Outward appearances can tell us many things about a person but it cannot tell us the degree to which they know they are loved.

Love is not a bouquet of roses or a candlelit meal in a fancy restaurant. It is not a box of our favorite chocolates or well chosen Valentine card though all of those are welcome…hint to my husband.

It does our soul good to express words of love to affirm each other but love goes deeper than words alone. Love motivates and expresses itself in what we do and how we treat people.

I pray we will not only tell someone we love them but that our actions will speak, not always the easiest of things to do but so worth it.

The other side of the coin is this.  Family and friends can tell and show us how much they love us yet we can still feel unloved. Why is that?  Why is it deep down we don’t believe them. We don’t know their love. 

Could it be that we don’t love our self? Not in an in-love-with-self kind of way more of having a healthy love for our self. I have found only as I accept God’s love for me can I love myself. When we see ourselves as God sees us as His child, dearly beloved child, wanted, celebrated and cherished we can begin to love ourself and as we do we learn to truly love others.

“And now these three remain; faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” 1 Corinthians 13:13

Until next week

Helena

Looking to Jesus. Living in His Radiance