Love has always been a struggle for me especially as I was growing up. In my home, it felt like love was a reward for accomplishing above and beyond your potential. Excellence was not celebrated but rather expected and I subconsciously developed the idea that the love I deserved depended on how well I could meet others’ expectations of me. I carried this mentality into all my relationships with my family, friends and the people I was romantically involved with. I believed that the more I did for them, the more love I would receive from them. And of course, I constantly found myself being taken advantage of and manipulated to the point where I thought there had to be something wrong with me and that I was unworthy of love.
I felt like nothing I could do would ever be good enough for anyone to accept me and then love me because I always found myself in the same situation, with a broken heart and nothing to show for the work I had put into the relationship. It did not occur to me that as I gave myself to others, I had never given to myself and before I knew what was happening, I had lost my identity and my self worth. So I often found that I settled for less and took anything I was given no matter how minuscule or demeaning because a little is better than nothing.
Then, Jesus arrested me.
I have truly sought love everywhere and nowhere have I found it except for in Christ. I was raised Christian but I did not have a personal relationship with God until a few years ago. One of the first lessons I learnt in my newfound relationship with God is understanding the link between Him as the creator and myself as his creation. I don’t know when and why I started to believe that I was unworthy of even God’s love. I felt that if humans, flawed as they were, couldn’t see my worth, how would a perfect God be concerned with me. I transferred all my baggage from my earthly relationships to my relationship with God. I followed Jonah’s example and ran as far away from God as I could.
I knew that nothing I could do would ever be good enough to deserve God’s love and I tried to convince myself that I was better off without it. But God is most definitely not man, His ways are not our ways. And just when I had given up all hope, when all doors had closed on me, when I had nothing left to give is when I first felt God’s love so undeniably. He said to me so clearly, “why do you not see how much I love you after everything I have taken you through”. All my life I had been looking for love everywhere else but its source. I discovered that God doesn’t give love, God is love; it is His nature and that is why we won’t find it anywhere else but in Him.
John 3:16 kept repeating in my spirit, and I realised that though I do not deserve His love, it’s not about who I am or what I do but instead all about who God is. God’s love led Him to make the ultimate sacrifice to restore our relationship, sacrificing His son. You cannot get that kind of love anywhere else — people today struggle to sacrifice even a little time for you.
The amazing thing about God’s love is that you have to rely more on your faith than your feelings for you to see it manifest in your life. His love is always there, ready for you, all you have to do is believe it and accept it.
Since I took a leap of faith to accept that God could love a wretch like me, so many things in my life have changed. The most radical change is that I am learning each day how to love myself. It is something so new to me because all I’ve known is to doubt myself. But now I no longer look at myself through my own eyes but through God’s eyes. Eyes that felt He needed me so much so that He had to let his son die so that he could get me back. Each day I meditate on 1 Corinthians 13:4–8 and I now use that as the benchmark to see whether I am receiving the kind of love I deserve especially from myself.
So what is love? How do I know when I am loving myself? I follow God’s word. Am I being patient with myself? Am I being kind to myself? Am I not allowing envy to consume me? Am I avoiding boastfulness? Am I being humble? Am I honouring others? Am I more selfless than selfish? Am I not easily angered? Do I avoid keeping records of wrongs done to and by me? Am I detesting evil and rejoicing with the truth? Do I protect myself, trust myself, hope in myself, persevere through it all?
Love never fails and the more you love God, the better you can love yourself and as you fill yourself up with love, you’ll be in a better position to offer it to others as well. God is the strongest link in the equation of love because His love is the only guaranteed reciprocal love; everyone else can let you down but God never will.
This article originally appeared here: https://medium.com/@carot/lets-talk-about-love-fe5e0eade096
Ekintambuza 
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