Advent – Love – Day 23

Have you ever taken the time to write yourself a love letter?

It’s not such a selfish thing, when you really think about it. 

We do it for our significant others, our children, our family members, and our friends. If we don’t say it in so many words, we express it with our actions or through spending quality time with loved ones.

Why not do the same thing for ourselves? 

If you’re like me, you might have just gotten an instant knee-jerk reaction, somewhere between a chuckling “that’s a stupid idea” to a quiet “no, thank you.”

And why? Let’s dig deeper to see what our bag of excuses has to offer today:

• What a waste of time! And during this week, of all times? You must be trying to kill me! There’s already too much to do to get ready for Christmas! 

• Oh, well, I can’t do that because it’s awkward. I’m not used to talking about myself. Isn’t that vain?
• I don’t like to write. I’m not good at it. Besides, isn’t thinking through all the things I love about myself good enough?
• I’m already “good enough, smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!” I’m practically Stuart Smalley from SNL in the flesh! I’m the king or queen of daily affirmations! Look at all the quotes on my Instagram feed!
• Love myself? I’m not supposed to be concerned with loving myself! I’m supposed to burn myself out at both ends like a martyr, until my soul is nothing but a wisp of smoke and a pile of ash!
• You want me to write about loving myself? Why, I don’t love anything about myself! 

If we’re being honest with ourselves, we can all say we’ve said that last line more often than we’d care to count. In fact, those of us who were raised in a shame-based culture, where we trembled through every Sunday sermon of fire and brimstone and gave lip-service to a God of love yet were constantly served the bread of condemnation, grew up with a terribly skewed view of what loving ourselves really means.

If we didn’t hear it from a pastor, we heard it from a teacher, or a parent, or some other family member. It might have come later, from a boyfriend or girlfriend or spouse or co-worker or boss.

The specific situations and the words spoken to us vary as widely as the cow patties spread across all the Earth’s green pastures, but the messages we internalized are the same:

“You’re not _____ enough.” (Pick your poison and fill in the blank.)

“You—along with your thoughts and your feelings—don’t matter.”

“You’re not worth it.”

The fallout? We either shrink inside ourselves, becoming less than what our Creator intended us to be, or else we attempt to outwork and outperform, either in real life or in our minds, our narcissistic tendencies expanding into a cloud of fantastical half-truths.

And the sad part is that God never intended it to be this way. We were never meant to loathe ourselves to the point of cutting our souls to the quick. Our inherent self-worth comes from knowing that we are made in the image of our Creator, and like an image, we reflect His glory and His love when we love others—and that includes loving ourselves.

Self-love is not a sin, not when it’s held safely within the hands of God, and diminishing your worth or your value only keeps you from living the way He intended.

Do we need to repent of our sins? Yes.

Do we admit that, apart from God, we are nothing? Yes.

Do we accept the truth that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that we live to serve HIm? 

Absolutely. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

He is the Abundant Life. He’s so much more than the “get out of hell free” card that you might have been led to believe that He is.

Get yourself a pen and paper, and before you write your own little love note, write one to your Creator. Spend some time with God and let His love heal your own soul-wounds. 

Praise Him and thank Him for loving you enough to come to this world, to put on flesh, and to give His life for yours.

I guarantee you, experiencing the love of God is exactly what you need to have the right kind of relationships:

With God.

With others.

And with yourself.

“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

Mark 12:29-30 NIV

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Reflection and Prayer: What does it really mean to follow Jesus’s commands in these verses? Pray to see yourself as God sees you, and let His love and forgiveness heal the damaged places of your soul.