Hey purpose peeps!
We’re t-minus twelve days away from Valentine’s Day which means, if you and bae celebrate the holiday you’ve got 12 days to find a good gift! Geordan (hubby) is one of those anti-commercialism type of guys so on past Valentine’s Days I’ve been the delighted recipient of bean chips, a pineapple, a coloring sheet, a toy magnet as a “clever” way of saying he’s attracted to me and the like. But the best gift I’ve ever gotten from G was the realization that he didn’t fall in love with me until I took the time to fall in love with myself. That self-love is what we’re going to talk about today because it will impact so many parts of your life whether single or dating, engaged or married.
If you’ve followed the blog for a while now, you know I’m big on transparency and as such I have to admit that I used to be terrible at the whole “self-love” thing. The way I viewed myself was always based on the people around me. If a friend didn’t have positive things to say about me, I assumed it was because no positive thing existed. I was constantly working to maintain friendships and stay on people’s “good sides” to avoid rejection, even if it meant staying around lifestyles that I knew weren’t helpful for my growth. If a guy would talk to me then turn around and ask someone else to be his girlfriend, I would see myself as broken or defective. This constant up and down of emotions and opinions left my self-esteem in shambles and can directly be correlated with the thoughts of suicide I had as a teen. It wasn’t until the Christmas break of my sophomore year of college (after a guy I was interested in asked for advice on how to ask another girl to be his girlfriend) that I finally decided – I was going to love myself apart from what people thought of me.
I initially spent a lot of time in prayer asking God that He would give me His eyes and help me to see what He saw when He looked at me. This was no overnight process and required the pruning of people in my life who weren’t helping me. I remember coming back during the spring semester and moving apartments. I had spent enough time living with the wrong people who were keeping me bound more than they were uplifting me.
I also did a lot of reading. The year before I had read Your Knight in Shining Armor: Discovering Your Lifelong Love and it was fantastic. But I didn’t initially apply any of the principles in it. I remember the biggest takeaway required a 6-month fast from men. No sooner had I committed myself to do it, than a guy popped up and I admittedly forgot about it. I didn’t realize until my junior year that God had in fact gotten His six months out of me after the winter incident.
I also read Priscilla Shirer’s A Jewel in His Crown and it flipped all my previous perspectives on their head. I remember one particular chapter called Jewels in the Mud, that talked about how sometimes, when guys choose not to date us, we, just as I had always done, start to believe that there’s something wrong with us. Shirer discussed that the failed relationships had more to do with the fact that we were not going to end up with that person no matter how you flipped it so the enemy likes to get us down to damage us for the next person. This rocked my world and one day I realized I didn’t see the same broken, insecure, hurt and harmed young woman when I looked in the mirror anymore – instead I saw a “woman of excellence.” I saw a daughter of the King. I saw a good friend who was loved and deserved to be a man’s first choice, not runner up.
The crazy part is that as God broke up my past perceptions I started to attract different types of friends.. Not ones who made me feel inferior, but ones who saw me as equals. Friends who would look at the pictures we’d taken together and talk about how good we looked in them which acted as an affirmation that I was “fearfully and wonderfully made,” just as God’s Word says. As an added bonus, that following semester is when Geordan came into the picture and the beautiful part was I was so consumed with God that I didn’t even notice him. I knew my value apart from everyone else, I finally had true confidence.
I’m not sure where you fall on the self-love spectrum today, but I hope your takeaway from my testimony is the admittedly borderline cliche – “no one can truly love you in the way that you need until you love yourself.” When you love yourself others can’t help but to love you. So in the practice of self-love I want you to do two things:
- Write yourself a love letter. Really take the time to explore what you feel about yourself and to cherish it. If you’re not in a place where you feel you can do that in earnest, ask God to help you discover the root of what it is you’re feeling and to fix it.
- Practice self-care on a regular basis – for you that might look like journaling, giving yourself the right nourishment, meditating, taking the pressure off people around you to show you your value.
I promise If you do this everyone will benefit from it. And me and bae probably both agree that your own self-love will be a fantastic Valentine’s Day gift.
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