Now here is what I am up to in this part of my challenge…
“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 12:29-31 NIV)
Now why did I just add that here? “Love your neighbor as yourself”
So how can I love my neighbor, IF I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO LOVE OTHERS…
I am currently on the the 17th day of this challenge… Now here is what happened in the last few days…
Last weekend was very tough… I wanted to quit and I almost did, yet now I am at the point where I would say that I lost 2 days which I will now take longer on this side of the journey.
Day 7 – Love believes the best…
Love … believes all things, hopes all things… (1 Corinthians 13:7 ESV)
Now this was an interesting day… Learned about these two rooms in my heart which is simple yet powerful…
What if you knew that you could find these rooms and choose whether you want to enter or not…
So what are these rooms?
Room of Depreciation… The room with all the rubbish you keep against someone… The room where you build ammunition for fights… This room that does more harm than good, if not correctly implemented…
Room of Appreciation… Room where all beauty is stored… All things you love about someone… All things that made you like that someone…
Now why did I even mention these rooms? To believe best, you need to know which room is for this… If you want to complement someone… YOU APPRECIATE THEM… If you want to be around someone… YOU APPRECIATE THEM… Now that sounds a lot like the Room of Appreciation…
But my challenge is not based on how to love people, but myself…
Have you ever thought:
“I am worthless”
“I am no good”
“I do not belong”
These are all from the Room of Depreciation… Think about it for a second… Non of these even build you up in any way….
Now I never complement myself…
I would believe it goes something in the line of:
Man, I am smart, even if I must say so myself…
I am loved, God loves me…
I am not alone, God is with me…
I am good, God is there for me when I am down…
This sounds like some things I might have to start saying to myself… My self esteem is pretty low and I do not ever really appreciate myself…
BUT LOVING ONESELF MEANS WE MUST APPRECIATE OURSELVES…
As for the Room of Depreciation.. The only real reason to enter is for the sole purpose as to find things to pray for… Not live there…
If there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things. (Philippians 4:8 NKJV)
Day 8 – Love is NOT jealous…
Love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire. (Song of Solomon 8:6 NIV)
“Jealousy is one of the strongest drives known to man.” – The Love Dare book
Now there are two types of jealousy as well…
Legitimate jealousy based upon love.
Illegitimate jealousy based upon envy.
What is the difference?
Legitimate jealousy normally happens when someone truly love and care about would turn away and replace you with someone or something else…
God made us, He loves us, we turn around and replace Him with sin… God being a jealous God has legitimate reason for this… In marriage it is exactly the same, that is why marriage should be fought for…
Illegitimate jealousy is when someone is better than you and you have selfishness…
This is normally when someone gets a promotion you wanted, the job you wanted or is more popular than you… You then to get angry at ourselves for not being good enough when the opposite might be more true…
Now can you be legitimately jealous of yourself? I believe you can…
This would mean that you do not replace your life, by becoming a workaholic or such, but put yourself a bit higher… You are more than your friends, your job and your money…This is tough… I know…. I am struggling with this a lot and I am learning most of this as I am typing… I just know sometimes, we are more important than the six figure salary we so badly want… If we love ourselves, won’t we rather want us to be at good health instead of destroying our bodies for the boss who doesn’t really care… A six figure salary is awesome, yet it can’t buy happiness…
Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. (Romans 12:15 ESV)
Day 9 – Love makes good impressions…
Wait, this doesn’t make sense does it?
Man with flowers? Why? All the others were easy to understand… Just the title in a picture, now this?
Greet one another with a kiss of love. (1 Peter 5:14 NIV)
How do you greet someone you care about? Hug? Kiss? Firm handshake? or just a half-hearted attempt at a wave… Which I sometimes do, especially when I am angry at a person… Or just ignore the person… Which I also have done…
Now how you tend to greet people says a lot, yet most times, the more foreign a person, the nicer we are…
We tend to be very nice to someone we never knew, yet family we tend to just walk by forgetting they exist, especially when we are mad…
How do we greet ourselves?
DO WE EVEN GREET OURSELVES?
This video actually shows all the about categories of this post pretty well…
Video: Daystar Church Youtube Channel
I think it is good, yet we tend to mess up a lot in this regard… We tend to see ourselves are worth less than our neighbor and neglect ourselves because of this…
For I have come to have much joy and comfort in your love (Philemon 7 NASB)
Day 10 – Love is unconditional…
Now this seems random… We tend to want to be loved… I really do… I am feeling that it becomes worse daily… I never really had friends… And now that I do, I barely see them… To some degree it really hurts… How do one love unconditionally if there is no motivation? Love is not really just based on feelings, but also a choice…. Feelings come and go, make the choice easier and harder, but remains a choice… I struggle to let love unfold… It is tough to love and love and love and love and love…. And never see anything for it… Always be there for everyone, but never seeing anyone…. Always caring but never able to actually see if it is actually going better…
God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8 NASB)
But God does this with ease for us… He jumps at the opportunity to love us and He saves us every time we feel like we are going to drown… Yet, time and again we make it so hard for Him to love us… We choose drugs, pornography, women, etc…(sometimes even coffee) over Him…. (this list differs for everyone, I just gave some examples)
How does He respond to us? The same… He chose to love us even if we decide everyday of our life to hate Him… Funny ain’t it…
Yet we push people away because they tend to ignore us for a while… Or are just to busy to see us… Is this unconditional love? I do not believe it is…. Not even a bit…
This is tough to realize now, but I have been treating some of my friends badly this past few days, because I am afraid to get rejected again… And we might believe it to be normal, but is it really normal? Is it really fair to us and them…
SO BEFORE I GO ON… I AM VERY SORRY TO ALL THOSE I HAVE NOT LOVED UNCONDITIONALLY… FOR WHOM I MADE LOVE ABOUT SEEING IS BELIEVING… I HAVE BEEN WRONG AND I NOW KNOW HOW WRONG I WAS….
Now… Can we love ourselves unconditionally? How do you treat yourself when you make a mistake? Do you beat yourself up or forgive yourself?
Put some scenarios out there… and test is… Do we know how to love ourselves enough to call it quits on something we really want to do, if it is not good for us?
You won’t believe my example…
A few months ago when 300: Rise of an Empire and The Lego Movie were in our cinemas, a few friends went to watch a movie… Everyone ready for 300: Rise of an Empire.
Firstly, we were all Christians who have a relationship with Christ, so choosing a movie should be easy, but what we didn’t think of was when the movie was going to show… We got to the cinema and found no 300: Rise of an Empire. This is a small problem… We wanted to see it… So we decide to pray about it… How Christian of us?… Pray about even what movie to watch (Just so you know, I pray even on what to cook etc). Funny thing we all knew we should not have watched 300: Rise of an Empire in any case… And we got it confirmed anyway, so we watched The Lego Movie… But we didn’t realize that The Lego Movie was actually going to teach us something about the world we most likely didn’t want to see…
If we decided to go back for 300: Rise of an Empire, we most likely would have hurt ourselves and made us hate ourselves and punish ourselves for it… Just so you know, I am not saying it is sin, just that is was not going to be good for us in that specific moment…
Unconditional love to ourselves would mean we put aside that which could harm us and open which could help us…
Please pray for me to have strength to see this through… I know it will be hard… so I would appreciate prayer…
God bless
Thank you for all the prayers