Acceptance is always the best path to loving

I've thought about this a lot lately. How our expectations of one another stand in the way of us loving one another. We spend so much time expecting people to be the kind of people we can love, and then resenting them for not becoming those people, that expectations often become a bigger pathway to hate than to love.

As I sit here this morning, the greatest gift in my life is the gift of God's love. I get to start my day knowing I am loved. Right now. God isn't waiting until lunchtime or bedtime or next week, when maybe I start acting like someone a little more lovable, God is saying to me in this very moment: I accept you just as you are.

God went to great lengths to prove that. When he came to earth and went walking from village to village preaching about love, his messages always started with I accept who you are and who you've been - he didn't start by making people put their hands on the bible and promise to change before he loved them.

Jesus always led with I accept you.

Any expectations Jesus had of people always started with the promise that I already love you. I always have; I always will.

In the earliest days of our lives, as babies, that is how we come to define love. We come to define it like Jesus defined it - by acceptance. We define it by the people who keep showing up, no matter what, love in their eyes, saying you are my people.

That never goes away - even as we grow older - the need to be accepted. The need to see it and feel it in the people who show up in our lives.

But as we grow older, sadly, it's often expectations that stand in the way of that. Babies are easy to accept. We give them unconditional understanding for why they aren't acting exactly the way we think they should act. We hold off on expectations and go all in on love.

Somehow we lose sight of that secret to life as the baby becomes a child and then a teen and then an adult.

We somehow think the definition of love changes over the lifespan.

Well for God it doesn't. God tells us he will always love us like a little child. Even when we are adults. Does he tell us that because it's the secret to HIS love, or because he wants us to discover the pathway to OUR love?

Maybe today experiment with making the balance of your interactions with people lean more toward acceptance than expectations. It is the more loving way to lean.