Hello everyone!
I write this today not to harshly correct or to make anyone feel bad but to simply encourage people to ask for help.
I have run into many people in my life who don't know how to love. I was married to a man who didn't know how to love. I recently seperated myself from a friend who does not know how to love as a friend. What do all of them have in common? They have never asked for help so they know how to love. They just keep on doing what they are doing in relationships and hoping for a different outcome. That is insanity and will only yield the same painful results over and over again. One can't blame anyone else if they will not learn how to do something different. Loved ones will not continue to be devalued and hurt by people who do not know how to love them. When you don't learn how to love, you lose many things and many people in your life.
I want to encourage anyone reading this who did not grow up with the greatest role models where love it concerned to find someone who can teach you how to love. Councelors, pastors, mentors and Jesus can teach you how to love. Jesus is Love so he is the best teacher. He has taught me so much about love these past four years. He has even taught me about my late husband's love, as jaded and tainted as it was for him. My late husband was a man who never had a good role model and did not seek one out. He went through broken relationship after broken relationship, even ours. If he had but given this to Jesus, Jesus would have taught him all there is about love and how to love. This would have turned his life around and our marriage around for much good.
I implore you to seek Jesus and seek help so that you may learn to love and be loved. Love is the greatest of all things! Love has been twisted over time but even in all that, true love still triumphs over evil and hate. Allow me to leave you some thoughts on love for those of you that need a place to start. I take this from my book, The Road Less Traveled: A Story of Love, Pain, Hope and Everything In-Between:
Encouraging the one you love in work, home duties, parenting, and in their hobbies
Letting your loved be themselves, even in disagreement
Accepting that person for who they are, faults, quirks, and all
Trust
Gentleness and self-control
Grace
Tenderness
Kindness
Patience
Always looking for the best in someone
This is the love list. You can learn to do these things. You are alive and breathing right? Anyone who is living can change, that means you can change too. Choose today to learn how to love. It will always grow and change and be a learning process for all of us. Love changes everything! Love can change you!
1 Corinthians 13:13; And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
Still learning to love,
Elizabeth