100% Loved
by Elizabeth Webb
I was asked a question recently: how does someone feel or act when they do not believe that they are loved? I work with these kids in New York City. Some of them come from broken homes, financially struggling homes or homes dealing with drug use or neglect. Others seem to have a fairly good home life and stable parents in their lives. When we work with these kids, many of them act out by picking fights, ignoring authority, disobeying, and lying, while others listen well, obey and are generally easy to watch over. When I was asked this question, I thought of these kids.
It would seem that each child acts out of an automatic response to how much they feel or do not feel loved. For example, if a 12 year old girl is belligerent, tough, picks fights a lot, is not very responsive to co-operating with others or simply shuts down around others, would it be so hard to imagine that this girl may not feel loved? What if her parents do not act like they care or are addicted to drugs or alcohol, forcing her into a situation where she feels completely on her own, unloved, unnoticed, forgotten and neglected? I think that, if I felt forgotten and that no one cared about me, it might make me a little mad sometimes and defensive and untrusting and definitely more than a little irritated at others who I perceived to have what I didn’t have.
I compared and contrasted two ideas in my mind: A child who believes he or she is loved has a calmness about them, they have an ability to simply trust, they can love freely, they feel safe and know that they deserve love and that it is completely normal to need and want love. A child who does not believe that he or she is loved, however, seems to be full of fear, is distrustful of everything, is afraid to love freely for fear of being hurt or having their love rejected, feels constantly insecure and has no assurance that they deserve to be loved. Their acting out or shutting down, their arguing and fighting or their lack of responsiveness is all a reaction to these feelings which are rooted in a belief that they are not loved.
But, the more I thought about it, the more I realized how much like these children I am in my response to how much I believe, or don’t believe, that I am loved. It’s as if we all live somewhere either on the extreme ends of these beliefs or somewhere in between and our actions, like the actions of these children, reveal how much we really believe we are, or are not, loved. I may believe that I am loved at about an 80% level so, while I can love freely, I still fight a fear in my heart that I am not loveable. Or, I may believe I am only 30% loved so, while I can’t trust anyone, I still have so much love to give.
I never really looked at life through this lens before. Honestly. I believe in love. I believe love is the most powerful thing in this world! I am a die-hard romantic. I LOVE love! But I still never thought to look at the world around me through a lens of “how do we live our lives out of how much we each believe we are truly loved?” If I really believed, deep, deep down in my soul believed, that I was loved, that I was so unconditionally loved that I could never, ever lose that love, how would I live out my life?
I try to imagine it and it’s almost like trying to imagine walking on air. Life would be so easy and so full of richness and depth. I would be able to breathe through every day and just enjoy everything around me without being so caught up in myself and my fears. Fear would fall away! And yet I would feel my deepest desires with more clarity and understanding. I would be able to add to others’ lives and they to mine. The ego would fall away! It’s not as if I wouldn’t feel pain or grief or anger but it would be full of healing instead of injury to myself and others and it would be full of wisdom rising up in wave after wave. It would feel like wounds actually healing instead of being simply bandaged if I knew, through my entire being, that I was loved. Forever.
I do not know if anything or anyone on this earth could ever, being as selfish as we all can be even on our good days, make me feel this loved. 100% loved. Could I look to myself for this love? But, then, how could I? What about the deep desire in my heart to have this love from someone outside of myself? I am sometimes the LEAST unconditional toward myself and my self-love has hurt others around me so, it does not feel possible that I could provide 100% love for, well, myself. And I’ve learned the hard way that any success in my career or my craft or in my relationships can never make me feel this loved because I am never good enough even for myself much less a fickle public or a frustrated partner.
The bible is full of images of God as a father and humanity as God’s children. I think this is a positive statement on how loved we are and how loved we can come to believe we are. Little children, little babies, are so automatically open to love, so quick to assume that love is theirs, should be theirs, simply for the having! It’s as if unconditional love is an absolutely natural thing to expect in this life and should be an absolutely natural part of it. But it is only over time, as love is built up or chipped away, that they, that WE, respond and act out accordingly.
The beauty of the freedom offered through love is extraordinary but this world lets us down, people let us down, we let ourselves down. Every day. All of our lives. We know perfect, unconditional love HAS to be true! We know it in our guts. Little babies just KNOW it! We NEED perfect love! Something inside of us knows that this idea CANNOT be a fairy tale. Because we yearn for it. Every day. All of our lives.
The apostle Paul writes constantly in the new testament about love and famously states that “love never fails”. Could it be possible that the reason belief in love or lack of it affects us so deeply is that perfect, unconditional love really DOES exist? A love that never fails? Could it be possible that we’ve just been looking for it in places and people that will only let us down? I say, keep looking for it. Be open to it. Lift up your eyes to the sky and ask for it if you want and maybe that frightened, angry, acting-out child in you will understand how loved we really are and will finally be able to be still and rest.
November 9th, 2007 at 10:37 am
What is 100% love?
I don’t know.
Is it possible to experience 100% love without loving 100%.
I don’t know. I do know what happens when one turns off the hot water in the bathtub, however.
If one wants to take a hot bath, one turns on the hot water. And one later turns off the hot water to keep it from overflowing only to find out as soon as one turns off the hot water the water starts turning cold To keep the hot bath hot, one must keep hot water flowing in but as one’s tub can only hold so much, one needs to let some out – either removing the plug or letting it overflow.
Love is dynamic. To be loved one needs a constant flow of “new” love. But we often plug its outflow so we end up having to turn off the faucet. Or we get concerned that overflowing love will make a mess of the room and we don’t want more mess in our lives so we again turn off love. The room stays dry and neat …and our love grows cold. And there we sit – in our love tub of cold stagnate water.
Or maybe it’s like writing. If you don’t put the “pen to the paper” or fingers to the keyboard, nothing gets written. Sometimes when one feels one has the least to write is when one needs to simply write, to do something, to get things moving. It will probably be poor writing, but poor writing, like poor love, is better than nothing.
I had a “love experience” two years ago that was incredible and was not of me, although I found myself in the middle of it. It was actually an experiment to see what would happen if I loved as Christ loved, to be “as Christ, as to Christ” - 24/7. During that time, I wrote a friend about what I was experiencing, using water again as the analogy:
The fascinating thing about “being Christ” or loving as “unto Christ” these past 8 weeks is the more I give, the more there seems to be to give.
It’s like, o.k., I have this jug of love (hmmmm… have to remember that) to pour out on whoever. I start rather carefully to make sure I have enough to go around and especially to make sure I have enough for the people who really deserve it. As I gradually pour it on more people, I find there must be more in there than it would seem to hold. I increase my love quotas. Still no running out. I eventually realize the jug is being refilled by God as fast as I can pour it out. Realizing the source and the resources of the source, I start pouring with abandon. I splash it around. I toss it on everything I come in contact with. I let it run down the sewer. I’m not afraid of wasting love on anyone or anything. The supply is limitless. I don’t think one can love or be loved too much. I pour and toss and splash with abandon.
To live life pouring out love with abandon - cool.
Was it 100% love? No. But it was far closer than the cold stagnant love I too often find myself retreating to.
(The “As Christ, As To Christ” experiment/experience - http://xcerpts.wordpress.com/2005/11/30/as-christ-as-to-christ/ )
November 9th, 2007 at 11:14 pm
Elizabeth you have hit it right on the head. I think we act out because we do not receive the grace of God. The miracle of the grace of God in us is that God wants the grace of God to flow thru us. This is our hope. When we do not have hope then this world is all that we have . So to ‘act out” is a reasonable response for this with no hope. When grace is my foundation, love is the evidence and our lives will be lived for others. WE become an extension of Christ and His suffering becomes our work. There is suffering that is common to man and there is suffering that is unique to the saints: love for others, love for Christ. Suffering is evidence That I am treating others with grace.
Elizabeth your heart for others is evidence of the suffering that reveals the grace in you. Keep living it girl
Gary