Intimacy: Who do you love? - Do you choose to love yourself?

FOCUS SCRIPTURE

John 15:9-13

DAILY BYTE

During counselling before marriage, one of the best pieces of advice I was given was that you must acknowledge your own, personal issues and make a plan to work through them before walking down the aisle - because everything that is unresolved at one end of the aisle will remain unresolved at the other end—only there, every issue of yours is doubled by the issues of your new life partner... Our own love (or lack thereof) of ourselves affects those we love!

Often, as Christian people, we concentrate so hard on how we are supposed to share love in our interactions with others that we forget quite easily God’s call for us also to love ourselves. That doesn’t even mean that we need to like ourselves all the time - it means much more than that. We are called to be committed to a way of life that allows love to “abide” within us, as the scripture for today from John says.

Before we can love anyone else, as the Gospel of John calls us to in verses 12 and 13, we are first called to let God’s love live in us. In his book, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World, the well-known writer, Henri Nouwen, writes to a friend, saying “The greatest gift my friendship can give to you is the gift of your Belovedness. I can give that gift only insofar as I have claimed it for myself. Isn’t that what friendship is all about: giving to each other the gift of our Belovedness?”

I remember waking up one groggy morning in seminary, rolling out of bed with the tiredness of a few hours’ sleep weighing down the bags under my eyes, and as I trudged into the bathroom and switched on the light, I noticed a small slip of paper stuck to the mirror at eye level. You are beautiful, it said. You are beloved. It felt difficult to believe, and yet, there it was. The love and belovedness that lived in the heart of one of my roommates had overflowed onto a simple piece of paper to bring me a reminder that I was beloved, too. I left that paper there for the whole rest of the year.

We all need a reminder in the mirror that before anything else that we do or say or fail to do or say, we are simply beloved children of God. Sometimes when we look in the mirror, seeing our wrinkles - some from past grief and some from anxious hope - seeing the things about ourselves that are in need of improvement, as we paste our hair down with wax and our pores closed with makeup - we fail to see first that we were created by a loving God who wants to shower that love on and through every intimate part of who we are.

Perhaps you’re thinking that you have quite a good relationship with yourself, and you know that you’re a child of God. But we all choose parts of ourselves to fill with disappointment and frustration, even just annoyance. God wants us actively to choose to open every part of ourselves and make it a living space for God’s love. God wants us to care for our whole beings in ways that reflect our understanding that every part of ourselves is beloved. Do you choose today to accept that belovedness and love yourself?

Questions for reflection:

1. Can you choose today to look in a “mirror” - examine yourself carefully - your appearance, your personality, your style of developing and maintaining relationships with God and with other people, your mind’s functioning, your heart’s longings, your body’s abilities and aches, and be honest with yourself. Which parts do you love? Which parts need the abiding presence of God’s love?
2. How can you choose to open yourself more deeply to the presence of God’s abundantly generous and accepting love in these particular parts of your life? How can you celebrate who you are and the things that you already love about yourself? How might God celebrate these things about you?

PRAYER

God, help me to accept that I am beloved in your eyes. May I come to love myself with humility and grace, as you have loved, do love, and will always love me. Allow the love the lives within me to overflow into the lives of others. I pray this in Jesus’ name, who taught us how to love with his generosity of spirit and his sacrifice. Amen.