I Am Lovable

The subject of love has been on my mind since I set out on my healing journey over a decade ago. Love, a strange emotion that I don’t really understand and unsure if I’ve ever really felt – love – pure, without bitterness or regret, without strings attached or unmet expectations looming in the distance, but love.

The Bible talks about love, Henri Nouwen’s book The Inner Voice of Love is all about self-love, and Joyce Meyer speaks about love constantly. Three sources I spend time with regularly, but I never really felt I grasped what it means to purely love and to purely be loved. And not only did I not grasp what it “means” to be loved, to be quite honest, I haven’t felt I was a person who could or should be loved.

My mother always said she loved me but her actions sang a different tune. She was caught up in chasing boyfriend after boyfriend. Add to that her untreated mental illness, drug abuse and emotional absence, and I never felt truly loved, since my earliest memories I’ve felt unlovable. If your own mother doesn’t bother to meet your needs, then what does that say about me? I’m not important. I’m not a priority. My mother doesn’t love me.

Fast forward from my traumatic childhood to my twenties. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve drank too much and gotten into fierce arguments, sometimes turning physical. I’ve drank and driven, putting children and families on the road in danger. I’ve lied, I’ve cheated, and I’ve hurt people I really, really loved. Did I love them? How could I love someone, and then hurt them? I’ve been hurt, too. How could someone love me, and then hurt me? How could someone push me and spread lies about me and call me names and deceive me, but love me at the same time?

What is love really? My life has been unstable and chaotic, traumatic at times. How is love possible in an environment like this, in a person like me?

I had a really great insight today and experienced one of those moments where you just know God is speaking to your heart. I was mentally going through imperatives I had read in my Henri Nouwen book and mentally revisiting a recent podcast of Joyce Meyer. And then it hit.

Losing someone’s love does not make me unlovable.

No matter how many failed friendships and breakups with boyfriends, no matter how many people who have left me and took their love with them, no matter what, from the beginning until forever…I am lovable. Me, as a living, breathing individual, I am lovable.

More so, GOD LOVES ME. Unconditionally and without constraints, I am loved by the creator of the world. He loves me no matter what I do and no matter what I don’t do. And I can come to Him any time with any problem or worry or sin and He will bless me and comfort me and lay peace upon my heart. Simply, all because He loves me.

I am lovable. And I am loved.