This year I decided to go on a self-love journey. I wanted to really love myself finally.
To want to love yourself and to actually love yourself are two different things, I always had the intent but didn’t really know how to execute it.
After praying to God about this one day I stood in front of the mirror – like okay God! Time to love myself! any minute now! As you can imagine I didn’t feel any different. So I knew something was wrong.
So I decided to change tactics. I read the famous Corinthians 13 and watched a few sermons. Which was when I had realised I had got it all wrong. I had completely miss understood what love was. I had reduced love to just an emotion, a tingling feeling in my body. For my whole life I had been waiting for an feeling of love. Not realising that love is way more than that.
Love is a conscious decision/demonstration, where conscious actions are made. To reduce love to just a feeling would be to massively underestimate its power, purpose and capability. It would reduce it to a temporary thing.
You can literally decide to love yourself. All this time I had been waiting for an emotion without realising that it was my actions towards myself that needed to change.
Making the decision to love yourself is easy, its the living in that decison that takes work.
Once you make that decision you need to:
- Protect that decision: Maybe there are things you need to stop doing that make you lose confidence in that decision (for example social media) or things you need to start doing that grow your confidence in that decision.
- Trust that decision: Know that the love you are giving you are giving yourself isn’t what you feel at that time but what you know.
- Hope in that decision: Have hope that the decision you’ve made to love yourself will change your negative perspective of life to positive.
- Persevere in that decision: In a world that tells you to compare yourself to others and makes you feel inadequate, you have to persevere and go against the norm in the decision you’ve made to know that you are good enough.
Once you fully master how to show love to yourself, you will be able to successfully reciprocate this unto other people.
I would encourage you to read 1 Corinthians 13: 4-7 make notes on how you can demonstrate love to God and to yourself. Also I have attached this video by transformation church that really helped me understand these concepts too!
With love always,
Temi xx
withlovetemi.wordpress.com 