How Do You Love?

Borrowing a page from the Bible.

“This is My commandment, that you love and unselfishly seek the best for one another, just as I have loved you.

John 15:12 AMP

Unselfishly seek the best for one another. Those are the words that challenged me when I read this verse.

I had to pause and #checkmylove and I found it wanting in a number of ways.

To unselfishly seek the best for another means to do things that will benefit the other person and not harm them.

It means to be deliberate and intentional and to always check your motives and desires and choices before you make them.

The question to always ask therefore becomes

How will she/he feel or benefit from me doing/saying this?

And that requires some depth that I know I have a lot of levelling up to do to achieve.

It means to always be conscious about the people we claim to love.

And what it means is that at times we will have to sacrifice our own desires and wants for the greater good of the other person.

What a wonderful world that would be?

There’s a pastor who once nailed it on the head when he said

Selfishness is the enemy of all relationships.

And the day I heard this statement, I had to again, take a moment and check myself and boy wasn’t it the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

I scanned through my relationships and every time I have ever had issues and 90 out of 100 times, it was because I put myself first and decided that my opinions, my feelings, my wants, my desires mattered more than the other person’s.

You cannot be empathetic or even just sympathetic when you are selfish. It robs you of the ability to look at things from the other person’s perspective because it makes such a grand statue of you and that becomes all you can focus on. It literally blocks everyone else and so you do what feels right to you and then leave others to deal with the consequences of your actions.