Learning to Love

While we are encouraged and even commanded by God to love one another, it isn't always easy to do. Loving actually needs to be learned.

We didn't come into the world knowing how to love, only with the ability to learn how to love. If we didn't receive healthy loving or if we didn't feel adequately loved when we were growing up, chances are as adults we will suffer from love deprivation and not know how to love properly—only how "to make" love which may or may not have anything at all to do with love!

In other words, to learn to love we need to be loved first—for what we didn't receive in our early developmental years, we need to receive now.

We do this by having at least one or two safe, loving, non-judgmental, and accepting people to love us as we really are—by allowing them see our total dark side—secrets, failures, sins, weaknesses, faults … warts and all. As these people love and accept us for who we are (not for what we have or haven't done), we learn little by little to love and accept ourselves. Remember, too, that we can only be loved to the degree that we are known, and we can only love and accept others to the degree that we have learned to love and accept ourselves. Admittedly this can be very scary but it is profoundly healing.

Dear God,
please give me
a few friends
with whom
I can feel safe
to let them know me
fully and love me still.
Through their love
and your love
please help me
to learn to love
and accept myself
in a healthy way.
In so doing
teach me
to love others
who also need
to be loved
in the same way I do.

Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer.