What is love? Baby don't hurt me....

So love. What a huge powerful, meaningful word that can do so much. Yet, it is tossed around every day like it's simply nothing. "Man, I love that car." "I love cheeseburgers. Their taste dances on my tongue." You get the idea, and probably also understand I enjoy a good cheeseburger. However, is it all the same? John Mark McMillan talks about this in a commentary to a song he wrong called How He Loves and how there are different kinds of love. Has that word become so overused that it has lost it's real meaning? Do we as people know how to love one another?

In 1 John 3:18 it says, "Dear children, let's not merely say that we love each other; let us show the truth by our actions. (New Living Translation)" I look around at our country, at our world, and wonder if we as humans are truly capable of loving our fellow humans.

Over the past few years, God has been working on my heart and mind about this idea of love. A verse that comes to mind is Mark 12:31. The basic idea is love others as you love yourself. Well that was easy for me. More for the fact that I was a self-loather than the fact I could easily love people. When you don't love yourself, it's easy not to love the rest of the people. So maybe the key to this was to love myself first.

For that we have to delve into the question of loving me. Why couldn't I love me? I think one of the biggest reasons for why it is so hard for me to love myself is because of where I find my value (As a side note, I do not have this all figured out by any means. This is simply where God has brought me so far). For far too long I have looked to other people to find out who I am. I look around at the people in my life, the society I live in, the groups I "run" with to find out who I should be and what is acceptable. I focused so much energy on trying to decipher the right things to do that I completely lost who I was. While there were times I liked myself, when you are trying to please everyone, you eventually become so burned out and weighed down you kind of start to hate yourself. Hence, I became a self-loather.

All this to say, God has shown me that there is no way I can ever be happy with myself until I find a definite and constant source to find my identity. Simply put, Him. I've slowly been moving my identity from the people around me to God. When I look to God, I am a man, who is loved. Not because I did something or deserve it, but because God loves me. With that, there is never someone I have to please, because He is pleased with me for who I truly am. Only after I finally learned to start at least liking myself because I am God's creation, can I start seeing others as they truly are. Beautiful creations of God, regardless of anything. Only after I began to love myself could I even fathom loving someone else.

So looking back over my post... I never answered what I started with. Do we still know how to love? Well maybe I will save that for next time because this has gone on far too long.