30. You are loved…

From the time we are born and can recall our feelings, our needs can be traced back to wanting to be loved. We need to feel that we are worthwhile and that our life has a purpose.

We begin a search for “love” and fulfillment that we call happiness when we are babies. We want to be accepted for who and what we are, the way we look, the way we talk, walk and feel.

Can we express our true feelings and ourselves and know without a doubt that we will still be loved? I doubt it. We have been victims of conditional love all of our lives.

So we set out looking for the perfect someone or something that will accepts us without excuses of “why” we are a certain way, but will love us just as we are.

A certain kind of freedom is in this kind of love for which we are searching. We long for it. We seek this love in money, only to find that money cannot fulfill us or love us. We try looking for it in fame, only to learn that fame brings with it another set of rules and restrictions.

We hear that we can be happy and fulfilled with good health, yet that is not necessarily true because most of us are already healthy and yet we take drugs. So that’s not the answer.

We are looking for the main element it takes to survive. That element is unconditional love. Very seldom do we find someone who will love us in this manner. In fact, there is only one person who can truly love us in this way, and that person is our Creator, the creator of love – our God.

Did you know that God, in all His wisdom, glory and power, created us from nothing, formed this world in perfect order and wants and loves for “love” – true love – free love.

In fact, he tells us in His word that we do not have any other God before Him to love. It is one of His requirements for salvation: Love Him, be grateful, respect Him, for without His love, we are aimless humans with nothing to offer, with no real meaning in life.

It is not enough to offer our talents or money or knowledge we need to offer our love. God knew that He could have us all love Him with nothing to say about it, but that would have been a useless and pretentious, powerless love.

So He gave us a free will – a choice. He then allowed negative forces to exist in His world. He loved us with a free, unattached love. If you will just love Him, He will love you back. Even if you don’t love Him, He will not demand or ask questions. He patiently waits for you, and loves you are you are.

You are never too bad, never too dirty or too low that His love cannot reach you. Nobody can love you like that. Not Mom, Dad, wife or best friend. No one can love you with such compassion and forgiveness and such freedom.

We have never really loved before. We have possessed, controlled, mojoed, pretended, used, faked, been selfish, secured, demanded. These are all misguided feelings of “love,” of what we were taught was “love.”

We were little babies and Mom “loved us” so much that she wanted to live our lives for us, possess us. All those things felt like love until one day we realized that something was wrong with that feeling. It was not free. It felt like we were being smothered. Love was conditional – it exacted a price.

If I was good, I was loved and treated kindly. If I was different, wanted attention or was naughty, I was told I was bad and did not deserve Mom and Dad’s love until I could show them I was worthy.

So I set out to find a free love. Someone who would love me when I was naughty and different, even foolish. Someone who, even if I made mistakes in growing up and experiencing life, would love me anyway.

When I could not find this love in pills, pot, permissiveness, profanity, prostitution or pimping, I began to love as I was taught, never feeling a freedom to love, never feeling I could ever become worthy of anybody’s love.

If I became the person they wanted me to be, then I would be loved. That just was not enough to fulfill me. I needed a different kind of love. I found the only source of that kind of love is God, the One Who created love.

Only God can give unconditional love, which can turn my taking pills and pot into pride and prosperity, my promiscuity into promise, my profanity into purpose, my pimping into protection and my prostitution into prestige.

God’s love is a changer and a charger. We will never be happy until we truly have God’s love taking charge of our lives. It is the only love that can truly fulfill.

You may find all those other facts and feelings in loves between Mom, Dad, girl, boy – those whose love we have to earn most of the time – yet you cannot earn God’s love.

No matter how hard you try, it is simply there for the asking we all need this love of God to be truly happy. There’s no way around it. People have lived and died a lonely life, never knowing the reality of God’s love, never really feeling “loved.”

You must learn to love freely without attachments that would control another’s life. Do not attach your love to a commitment. Commit your love freely, unattached. There is a difference; one is wrong, the other is right.

It is such a great feeling to know when someone loves you for your sake, not for love’s sake. When someone loves you, it is for the worst, not the better; it is forever, not just for awhile.

When someone loves you, it is for your freedom to choose not necessarily that person, but life itself. Somebody will always love you. Lift up your heads. Take notice this day that you are loved by somebody. That somebody is God, which makes you somebody, too.