Real Love Is

       I read a post this morning and re-shared it, the nine words on it were so true and touched my heart so deep that I very nearly cried as I read them. It read 'God gives me the love that the world cannot,' as someone who has lived their whole life feeling rejected by their peers and worlds away from the rest of their family I know those words, I could have written them. I never felt secure in love before God's love covered me and I began to finally understand real love. Before that I had doubts and fears and walls to protect myself in all my relationships, including my parents and husband. My experiences and disappointments taught me that nothing and no one was to be trusted and I had to protect myself, protect my heart.
       This is a really hard thing for me to admit, but it's true. I doubted and questioned every relationship in my life and because of that I was kept from fully experiencing just how wonderful love could really be. But after I started an intimate, time consuming, thought consuming, heart consuming relationship with Jesus this changed. In the last 2 1/2 years and especially this past year as I worked on this blog and God used it to teach me about Him, and my own shortcomings, I have learned a lot about what love really is, and what it takes to experience love to it's fullest.
       I learned first that I had these same walls in my relationship with God, and God broke me down until I accepted that it was all or none. He brought me to a point where I finally confessed everything and begged to be free from it for good. When I was finally fully vulnerable and open to Him I was filled up with a peace and a security that I never known before. I finally felt safe and loved so deeply that I knew nothing could ever shake it, and I knew in that moment that I could never live without it in my life again. I realized suddenly that there truly was no life outside of God, and pleasing Him was much more important than pleasing man. Man had rejected me, man had made me feel worthless and afraid to trust anyone even myself, but God's love covered all of that.
      I have learned that real love is honest, and vulnerable, it is giving and forgiving, and has nothing to do with fairness. Real love is jealously protected and more interested in the other's happiness than your own. Real love is sacrifice, just as Jesus self-lessly sacrificed for us. To love there must be vulnerability, there must be trust and honesty, there must be forgiveness without expectations of fairness, and you must be humble, pride has no place in love and will bring only tension and distance. God has taught me all of this, some of it many times over until I understood. God gives me the love that the world cannot, because there is no love outside of God,  because God is love, you must know God to understand the fullness of love, otherwise what we experience is only a shadow of what could be.

Psalm 62:8        
Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us. Selah

Jeremiah 31:3        
The Lord appeared to him from far away. I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.

1 John 4:8        
Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

1 John 4:16        
So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

1 John 4:19        
We love because he first loved us.