I Call You to Love
On loving God fully, loving others despite what they’ve done, and learning to love yourself well.
There are seasons in life when love becomes the most complicated word in your vocabulary.
Not God’s love — that, I have come to know as the one thing that has never once shifted beneath my feet. But human love. The kind that promises and then leaves. The kind that chooses someone else. The kind that goes quiet in the very moment you need it most. That kind of love has cost me something. And for a long time, the idea of loving well felt like being asked to walk back into a room where I once got very badly hurt.
Maybe you know that room.
Maybe you’re standing in front of it right now.
Loving God — With All of It
Matthew 22 doesn’t leave much room for negotiation. Love the Lord your God with every passion of your heart, with all the energy of your being, with every thought that is within you.
Every passion. All your energy. Every thought.
What strikes me about this is its totality. God is not asking for a portion of you — the tidy, presentable, already-healed portion. He is asking for all of it. The weary parts. The unresolved parts. The parts still quietly carrying the weight of what someone else did.
He is not afraid of your humanity.
I spent years trying to bring God only the cleaned-up version of myself. The surrendered one. The one who had forgiven and moved forward and didn’t still sometimes feel the ache of what was lost. I believed, somewhere deep and unexamined, that He needed me to have it together before I could truly come close.
But that is not what He asks. He asks you to come in. To stop standing at the threshold of His presence and actually cross it — with your mess, your questions, your fears, your unfinished grief, your very human and very tired heart.
Loving God fully doesn’t begin with resolved pain. It begins with proximity. With choosing, today, to bring Him everything rather than only the parts you feel are worthy of His attention.
Pour yourself out before Him. Allow every part of you to seep into His presence. He has already paid the price to bring you as close as you would like to come.
Don’t stand outside of that.
Loving Others — Despite What They Did
This is the harder conversation. And I want to have it honestly, because I think we have been handed far too many tidy answers about forgiveness and not nearly enough genuine company in how long it actually takes.
Someone I loved left. Chose someone else. And the aftermath wasn’t only pain — it was the dismantling of a future I thought I was building, an identity I had unknowingly wrapped around a life that no longer existed. The grief was complicated. The anger was real. And the road back to love — toward others, toward God, toward myself — was not a straight one.
Loving others despite what they did to you is not the same as saying what they did was acceptable. It is not pretending the wound wasn’t deep. It is not performing forgiveness for an audience, or rushing a process because someone decided you should be over it by now.
What it is — what I’ve come to understand slowly and with a great deal of surrender — is an act of spiritual obedience that ultimately liberates you.
Bitterness doesn’t punish the one who hurt you. It simply asks you to carry something heavy for the rest of your life. And you were not made for that weight.
Loving others, including the ones who disappointed you and the ones who chose to leave, is rarely a feeling you can summon. It is a decision you return to. Sometimes daily. Sometimes in the middle of a conversation, a memory, a date on a calendar that suddenly hits differently. It is a slow and often quiet work. But God honours the slow work. He sees every small act of release. Every prayer that begins: I don’t feel this yet, but I choose it anyway.
That is enough. That is, in fact, extraordinary.
Loving Yourself Well
This, I think, is where most women quietly struggle the longest.
Not because they haven’t been told they have worth. They have. They’ve heard the sermons and read the books and know the right answers. But there is a significant difference between being told you are valuable and actually experiencing a love that doesn’t leave, doesn’t disappear, doesn’t choose someone else when you are no longer convenient.
Somewhere in the gap between what women are told and what they have actually lived, a quiet voice takes up residence. It says: maybe not. Maybe not you.
Learning to love yourself well is the ongoing, daily practice of agreeing with what God says about you — even when your history offers evidence to the contrary.
It means resting instead of striving. It means setting limits not from self-protection, but from self-respect. It means choosing environments and relationships that honour who you are becoming, rather than confirming who you were told you were. It means receiving care without immediately deflecting it. Sitting quietly — and repeatedly — in the truth that you are not too much, not too little, not too broken, not too late.
You are the woman He formed, called, and is not finished with yet.
God’s love, when you actually let it reach you — not just inform you, but reach you — begins to change how you see yourself from the inside out. It restores hope where disappointment had settled. It releases something in you that survival mode had locked down. It teaches you, gently and over time, what it means to be loved without performance. And from that place — only from that place — you begin to understand what it means to love yourself well.
The Circle, Not the Ladder
Jesus ties these three loves together for a reason.
You cannot love others with any depth or sustainability from a place of chronic self-abandonment. And you cannot love yourself well without being first anchored in something that does not shift — His love, not the conditional kind the world offers.
It is a circle, not a ladder. Each one feeds the other. Each one requires the others to be whole.
So if you find yourself exhausted by love today — if the giving has depleted you, or the receiving has frightened you, or the idea of trusting again feels like more than you can hold — I want to say this to you gently:
You don’t have to have it resolved to begin.
Simply come in. Bring what you have. Bring all of it — the complicated, the wounded, the not-yet-healed. Bring the love that feels too risky and the self-worth that feels too fragile. Bring the anger you’ve been carrying and the forgiveness you haven’t quite found yet.
He is not afraid of any of it.
And once you experience what it feels like to be loved like that — wholly, unflinchingly, without condition — you will find it harder and harder to keep that love only for yourself.
That is the whole point. That has always been the whole point.
May you love God with everything you are. May you release what others have done and find, in that releasing, the freedom you didn’t know was waiting for you there. May you look at yourself with the same tenderness He has always looked at you with.
And may every step of that journey be a walk held, beloved.
“Love the Lord your God with every passion of your heart, with all the energy of your being, and with every thought that is within you. And love your neighbour as yourself.” — Matthew 22:37–39
