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Each of us are born on the maddening Journey to love & be loved…to matter or to belong.

We already know, that life without meaningful love makes no sense & if love is not found, we live with both confusion & loneliness.  Sadly, in fear of being lonely, many of us settle for any form of love at all & never hold on for, or push through to, the deeper levels of love.  Not only do we accept a lesser love, our habit is to cover our loneliness as well, learning to live with a “new normal” while carrying a wound within.

One of the main reasons we accept any form of love, is that we also carry this fear of being unloved, we own the lie that says we are unlovable.  Some call this, the “fear of being found out” or the “if you really knew me – you wouldn’t love me” lie.  What most of us to deal with this, is that we hide the real us.  We act like others want us to or we hide a part of us that we have deemed unlovable.  The result is the same, our loneliness.

Love is extremely powerful.  And rightly so.  For love has the potential to change a life forever…Though we have this deep desire to love courageously, sadly, too often we stop far short of it.

It typically stems from something we inherited.  If those that were meant to love us, loved us imperfectly, then our tendency is to love others in the same manner.  IE – we perpetuate the lesser love.

Some of the most common fails in love:

• Love not being expressed – From those meant to love us most (parents & significant others)
• Love not being properly expressed – Love being conditional or manipulative
• Love not being freely expressed – Love being an uncomfortable thing to express freely
• Love being wrongly expressed – It being withheld or living in extremes (all or none)
• Love being confusing in its expression (IE words & actions not lining up) – Hearing the words, but there being either no confirming actions to back it.

Though we might grow up & recover from the hurt, our tendency is to love the way we were loved.  No matter that we despise the pain we inherited, it’s our model & we love from what we know – flawed.  We mimic the love we inherited…yet, within hating that we are following in the steps that we detest.

We love from a wounded heart & it just doesn’t work right.  Or, when others try to love us, we filter it through what we learned & again, it just doesn’t work right – for our filters prevent deep love from getting in – all because of a lie we carry within.

Learning to love deeply, for some takes a long time, while many never get it at all.  But, we have to try.

The prize of deep love is too good to not try…until we get it right.

If we don’t allow God’s love to perfect ours – we live expressing & experiencing a flawed love our entire life…with this loneliness that was never meant to be a part of our life.

I John 4:18 says it like this: There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love.

We have to admit that we our love is not what we dreamed it would be.  We have to be willing to face it…talk about it…work on it – until…

Identify how you love others through “the flaw” AND decide to stop perpetuating it.

Ask God to help you understand HIS love for you.

Ask God to help you quit believing & settling for a lie.

Be determined to discover, within yourself, the love you dream of & then live in it.

TODAY – take a courageous step in your love…be determined to love more perfectly.

Until…

b

Don’t just read this – seriously take a step today in loving those in your life more perfectly.

Tomorrow we will look at loving DEEPLY.

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