on love

Mmm. This is in regards to my last post about hating myself.
I think that God has shown me love in so many ways in just the past day.

My brother called me yesterday and asked if I was going to be around next Thursday to chaperone Richards' field trip to SF. He also told me that Camacho wanted me to visit him. That just made me smile knowing that my high school teachers remember me :) I've sent both of them a few emails here and there, but it was just nice to know I'm not forgotten.

I've been really blessed by a brother of mine (who is probably reading this right now!) just through an email. He talked about love. My QT passage today was from Isaiah 44 about idols. God has really used these two things to reveal more to me about my biggest struggles right now. I'm just gonna insert a few exerpts from his email that really struck me, and I hope that this will serve as a reminder to myself and to others who are reading this.

And because God's love is so amazing, so overwhelming, so massive, it overflows out of us when we love God, allowing us to love everything He has created. He lets us love.
Love is the greatest gift we receive from God. I think I overlook this fact. I always assume that GOD's love is His gift to us, but in fact, He also gave us the gift to love EACH OTHER. We can't comprehend unconditional love because our world is so so so broken. But as Christians, we are called to emulate Christ and love as God did.

God gives us three great gifts. Faith. Hope. Love. Love is the strongest of the three. Faith and hope last us this lifetime, but when we're in heaven, we need not have hope. We need not have faith. We're already in heaven. We no longer need faith or hope. But even then, we still need love. So of God's three greatest gifts for us, Love is the strongest of them all. It always perseveres. Love never fails.
That part just ties together the 1 Corinthians 13 verse. Love NEVER fails because we need it even when we are in Heaven.

God loves you, you should not ever, ever, ever even think of hating yourself. If you hate yourself, you're hating a creation of God. If you don't love yourself, you cannot love. In the Ten Commandments, one of the commandments is "Love thy neighbor as thyself." How can you love your neighbor if you don't love yourself.... Learn to love yourself, and then you will be able to love others, not the other way around. Do not seek love in others to find love for yourself.
I need to learn how to love myself, because God created me in a perfect way. He knit me in my mother's womb. I pray that I will learn to accept myself for who I am: as God's beloved daughter. He intentionally made me the way I am, and I am to seek the ways in which I can bless my community with the gifts He has given me.

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I think I'm touching upon the beginning of learning how to give these feelings up to God.
I can't wait until I reach that point.. knowing that I am strong enough to just lift everything up to God and trust that He will perfect them in His own timing.