Love has no expectation of being right

​I've played this cycle out in my life more times than I can count and way more times than I am proud of:

I tell someone a truth 'because I love them.'

They don't accept my truth.

I no longer feel as much love for them.

What I've discovered in that cycle is my truths have often been far more about my need to be right than my desire to heal and love.

When truth comes from a place of love, it's not dependent on someone accepting it. When truth comes from a place of needing to be right - it's ABSOLUTELY dependent on someone accepting it.

The reality is, we have no control over how someone accepts our truth, we can only control how we offer it.

My greatest teacher for this lesson is Jesus. He came offering truths about love - what it actually looks like to love one another.

Not everyone liked Jesus' truths. In fact, a group of Roman leaders decided to kill him for being so vocal about them. What was Jesus' response to this? He said, I understand you aren't buying it guys. I get it. Do what you need to do.

I still love you.

If you believe the Jesus story, that he rose from the dead three days after those leaders killed him, then surely you believe he could have found a way to force his truths on them.

But he didn't. Why?

Because his main truth was about how we are to love one another without needing to be right. His main point was that our hearts always need to be bigger than our egos.

An egotistical God would have stuck around and made sure his killers paid a price for not accepting his truth.

But my loving God died on a cross and said, I forgive them. I told them the truth about love - I accept they didn't believe me.

Did Jesus go through that to demonstrate he had some super human capacity to love, or to model the capacity to love he believes we all have within us? A capacity he died to help us discover?

There's a freedom that comes when we love without needing that love to be received in a specific way.

I write this today with hopes you feel loved. Maybe you don't believe in Jesus. Maybe you don't believe there is much truth in what I've written. There would have been a day I wouldn't be OK with that; today I am.

Because more than ever, my desire is for you to feel loved by me, not for you to agree with me.