Hiding From Love

How do you feel when someone says they love you? I'm not talking about the thrill that comes bursting through when you first hear those three words. I mean, way down deep, what do you really feel? What are you really thinking? Do you believe them? Is there a doubt that creeps through, an anxiousness and panic that you now have to somehow live up to what they are offering you?

I have struggled for a very long time to learn how to receive love. I haven't known how to believe I'm worth being seen in such a good way, much less having so much goodness given to me. Others tell me I matter, that they care, and I hungrily and eagerly grab it close to myself, but within moments I am left wondering if they really meant it or if they will still feel the same way next time. I get so flustered and embarrassed when people tell me they love me, that I'm beautiful, that I mean something to them. I don't know what to do with it. I don't know how to be inside of their acceptance of me. I want so badly to be affirmed and approved of and attractive enough to be noticed, but when I am, I instantly downplay the moment and somehow end up rejecting everything I need most.

We have an idea of what love looks like, what we know it should be for us, but there's this insidious self rejection and self hatred that has seeped into us and brings us to ruin. It's just taken on a different form so that we haven't recognized it. Abusive, addictive relationships, pornography, hanging on to people who we know will only hurt and destroy us. A heavy unworthiness has fallen over us so that even when we are offered what we most hope for, we don't know how to let ourselves receive it and inevitably end up sabotaging it because we don't know how to let ourselves be loved.

The truth is we will never be able to receive love from anyone until we have really let ourselves receive it from our Lord Jesus Christ. We say we know this. It's so obvious, how could we not know? We've heard over and over how He's loved us since before the creation of the world and how He knows every hair on our heads, holds all our tears in a bottle, has our name written on His hand, thinks about us constantly. But it's almost as if we've heard these things so many times that we tend to dismiss them as old news or ordinary. Been there, done that, bought the T-Shirt.

We are trying so hard to get enough love to make us believe we're enough, but we're not believing the One who has already made us

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