Loving and Being Loved

When a person feels loved, he is loving towards others.

And people who give a lot of love, receive a lot of love. Love creates love. It can be great.

But if I don't feel loved, then I can't be more loving, which makes me less lovable. It can be awful.

When I'm not feeling loved, I don't have much love to give. When I am not feeling loved, I want to receive.

I can't force myself to love another person any more than I can force someone else to love me.

It's circular. We can't love unless we're loved, and we (mostly) won't be loved unless we're loving.

When the cycle of love is working positively--you give love and receive it from the people you love--it's great, but how do you get it started again when it's been damaged?

To get the cycle of giving and receiving love started again and to keep it going during the hard times--and there will be hard times--we need to have love flowing in from outside of us.

There is love available. God is loving us all of the time. His love is being poured out to us, all of the time. But we're usually insensitive to it.

The way to get love flowing in a relationship again is, I believe, to be receptive to the love that God is giving us.

God sends his love to us through other people in little ways. Our job is to recognize it and receive it.

Others are not usually going to shower us with love, but they will sometimes respond to the little loving impulses that God is giving them. And we need to recognize this when it happens.

Rather than grumbling over what we aren't getting, we need to see the love that is there.

God also gives us little loving impulses, and our job is to act on them.

He suggests small acts of kindness and gentleness. When we act on those, trusting God as we do so, we bring more love into our relationships, and into the world.

Love comes in little ways, and we generally give love in little ways.

As we learn to act on our little loving impulses, to recognize and receive the love that is being given to us, and as we are grateful to God for the love we do receive, it increases.

We find ourselves giving more love and receiving more love.

When we don't feel loved, it is hard to see beyond the negatives, beyond the ways in which we aren't loved.

When we don't feel loved, we need God's help. There's no other solution. God is the source of all love.

When we can't see the love around us, when we seem deaf to God's loving impulses, we need to ask God to help us. We need to ask him to help us experience his love and help us give his love to others.

God wants us to receive his love. It comes freely. It is his gift to us.

As we accept God's love for us, we have love to give to others, and the cycle of love begins again.