Loving before you understand what love is is unhealthy and destructive.
Have you ever been in a rush to get somewhere and ended up taking the wrong turn because you somehow lost focus, missed a turn, or took the wrong turn? Well, that's how love is sometimes.
We can sometimes be in such a rush to have a family or to find our "true love" that we enter into a wrong relationship or enter a good one before we should have.
As good as it may be to live in the moment, however, when it comes to your heart, you need to exercise caution. The Bible says:
Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life. Proverbs 4:23
Sadly, we are not protective of our hearts, which is why a lot of people are walking around wounded. It is not just because they loved the wrong person, but because they did not understand what true love is. Therefore, they felt and fell for the counterfeit idea of love.
When you grow up being taught the wrong ideas concerning love, you adopt these into your life in different ways.
You may think that you need to earn love.
Pretend to be someone you're not.
You need to beg to be loved.
You need to endure an unhealthy amount of pain.
You need to be attached to the hip (no independence).
You must exert authority over, or manipulate, others.
There are just so many other unhealthy things you do in order to receive and fill this great desire within you to be loved and to love in return.
Which is why love means different things to different people, and when you don't know the true definition of healthy love, you'll find it in all the wrong places. Beyond that, you will end up causing yourself unnecessary heartache that you could have avoided.
Consider this:
if the heart is a wellspring of life, when it is broken or contaminated, what happens to that well?
Beyond this, how does that affect your life as a whole?
Because of the conditions of our hearts, they do not flourish, nor do we grow towards becoming who we are called to be.
When you understand the love of God as a parent, friend, brother, etc., you will begin to understand or have a standard that you can use as a barometer for the kind of love you accept in your life and from people. However, when you don't have this standard, you take what you can get, because it appears to be the road of ease.
When you have learnt what love is from God, you begin to understand your worth and that you are worthy of being loved. Therefore, learn to love yourself with all your flaws and you'll be less inclined to self-hate.
Hence the concept of loving people as you love yourself. But this all stems from God.
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