Hard to Love

Hard to Love

If you haven’t heard this song, take a listen now.

Now I know the song is meant to be a love song, but I want to look at it from a different perspective.  I know we all have those people in our lives who are just hard to love.  Sometimes it seems like they purposefully do things to drive us crazy (you know you what I’m talking about!).

But I want to tell you about the person I’ve had the hardest time loving…

That person is ME.

I’ve spent many years of my life not feeling like I was good enough…call it the curse of the oldest child or that of a perfectionist, but either way I’ve never felt like I was enough.
A lot of my feelings of unworthiness came from my own fears and expectations of myself.  Self-image is something that’s always been a sore spot for me.  I’ve always been my own worse critic in everything.  I never thought I was pretty, and I’ve always battled with my weight (still do to this day).  Most of my teenage years were spent trying to find ways to make myself feel pretty, which most of the time just led to more heartache because I never felt like I measured up.   I was smart, but not the smartest.  I was funny, but not the funniest.  I was sweet, but not the sweetest.

It takes a toll on your self-esteem when you never feel like you’re good enough for anything.
As I journeyed through my twenties, I learned more about myself than I ever thought possible.  The first half of my twenties saw me learning about the kind of person I wanted to be and the kind of person I didn’t want to be.  I started to realize that no one was ever truly going to love me until I loved myself (but my biggest problem was learning how to love myself–that’s the tricky part).

The second half of my twenties brought some very interesting life lessons.  After growing the backbone I’d been missing for years (I was the biggest doormat EVER), I lost several friends.  At the time, I was once again was hit with that overwhelming fear of not being enough for them.  But, by the grace of our sweet Lord, I realized that their problem was just that…THEIR problem (not mine).
I’ve learned that people will absolutely disappoint you and break your heart.  That old saying that the only person you can trust is yourself rings true when you encounter situations that make you question things about people and yourself.
 

But what do you do when the person you can’t trust is yourself?

The only answer I could come up with is to PRAY.  It took a lot of prayer and a lot of self-examination for me to get to the point where I felt like I could love myself.  I think one thing that helped me the most was to really learn about myself.  One of the best books I read during this time was “The Five Love Languages for Singles” by Gary D. Chapman.  This book also helped me to relate better to others and see why certain people act the way they do.
We are all “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalms 139:14).  I’ve come to realize that if GOD loves me, then why shouldn’t I love me?  He sent His Son to die for my sins…the enormity of that just blows my mind and does something inexplicable to my heart.  If the Creator of all things can love me, then I should love me too.  If He can forgive me for my sins, then I can forgive me too.

Now, I don’t worry about measuring up or being enough.  God’s love is enough.  If I’m enough for God, then I’m more than enough for everyone else.

 

 

 
 
The first person you need to fall in love with is God…once you have Him in your heart, then you have to fall in love with yourself.

YOU ARE ENOUGH AND YOU ARE WORTHY!