"I love you..."
How do you feel when these three words are spoken to you by your spouse, your children, your friends, or a stranger? What about when the person whose hurt you the most proclaims their undying love for you all within the same breath? Do you get a warm tingling feeling or does contempt and hate course through your veins?
Growing up, I found love to be nothing more than a catch phrase people said out of habit. For me, it held no more weight than someone sneezing and the automatic response being, "God bless you." I felt I drifted through life with a disadvantage, because if I didn't know love then how could I have loved myself? It took a lot of self-reflection but I realized the reason why I never received love was because I simply didn't know.
As women, we are the ones helping others gain better position throughout life. We push, fight, cry, scream, and tear down barriers for our family and friends, but in the midst forget to fight for ourselves. How can we properly display love to those around us if we neglect to show love to ourselves?
So, I made this issue about YOU. I wanted you to take the time to reflect on those things that have shaped your thinking on love, what does it mean to you, and are you loving yourself as the bible clearly demonstrated in 1 Corinthians 13?
1 Corinthians 13 (The Message)
1 Corinthians 13
The Way of Love
1 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. 2If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing. 3-7If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love.
Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.
Love doesn't strut,
Doesn't have a swelled head,
Doesn't force itself on others,
Isn't always "me first,"
Doesn't fly off the handle,
Doesn't keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn't revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.
8-10Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.
11When I was an infant at my mother's breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good.
12We don't yet see things clearly. We're squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won't be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We'll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us!
13But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love. At the end of this journey, when someone asks, "Whose loving you?" I want you to boldly say, "I am," and mean it.
Loving you because I am learning to love me,
