But it is exactly how God created life to be. It is the nature of the love He created. Nobody can be forced to love another. It must be in the form of a gift which can be accepted or rejected. And the most important example of that is God’s love for us. God gives us a choice about whether we will receive His love and reciprocate it or reject it. I am learning that when I choose to say yes to God’s offer the process of true peace and freedom begins to unfold. Yes, I have learned this truth before and accepted it to certain degree as well. But as I described in an earlier blog entry I had been lured away by the promise of a counterfeit love. The empty love of feeling good about myself based on the acceptance and approval of others. Or believing that relationships with other people would some how bring me to the place where the love I am wired to crave is secured. This is where our internal prisons are made, shackles for my heart. I entered into this pursuit of a counterfeit love believing that I was still in a right relationship with God. Deception had clouded my view and my perception. I ended up in a place where I was honoring God and our relationship with my words only, not my heart. There is no true love, in any relationship, without the involvement of the heart.
My journey has now brought me to the place where I am tasting once again the freedom and rest (peace) that goes along with entering into a true love relationship with God where my heart is fully engaged. This is a place where I learn more about who I really am. It’s a place where I can bury the false identity I attempted to create to acquire the love I was hungering for which was available to me all along for free, with no effort and no strings attached. May that same love be deeply rooted in your heart today. Blessings.