Learning to Be Loved

I’ve had a difficult time receiving encouragement from other people for most of my life. Even now, there are moments when someone says something kind about me, and I can feel myself wanting to move the conversation somewhere else. Sometimes I’ll downplay what they’ve said or find a way to turn the attention back toward them. I’ve gotten pretty good at doing that over the years.

I never really thought of myself as someone who struggled to receive love. I cared deeply about people, enjoyed encouraging them, and found a lot of meaning in being there when someone needed help. I could sit with someone who was going through a difficult season, listen to what they were carrying, and want to help them work through it. That part of relationships has always felt fairly natural to me. But when someone turned that same attention toward me, I wasn’t nearly as comfortable.

I think part of the difficulty was that I didn’t always believe what people were saying. I could appreciate someone taking the time to encourage me, but there was something inside me that questioned whether they really meant it. If someone told me I was doing a good job or expressed appreciation for the kind of man I was, I could immediately think of reasons they might be giving me too much credit. I knew the things I struggled with, the mistakes I had made, and the parts of myself that still needed work. Sometimes it was easier to dismiss their encouragement than to consider that they might actually see something in me that I had difficulty seeing in myself.

It took me a while to recognize how often I was doing that. I had become so accustomed to redirecting conversations or minimizing what someone said that it didn’t seem unusual anymore. Eventually, I began paying attention to what was happening inside me when someone offered genuine encouragement or affection. I started wondering why receiving something good from another person could make me uncomfortable when I had no difficulty offering those same things to someone else.

That question led me into parts of my own story that I hadn’t fully understood.

I’ve come to believe that we carry more of our past into our relationships than we sometimes realize. We begin learning what love looks like long before we have the ability to examine those experiences. We form beliefs about ourselves through the way people respond to us, the things they say, and sometimes through what we needed but didn’t receive. Those experiences can shape what we expect from relationships, even years later when the circumstances of our lives have changed.

Several years ago, I began looking more closely at my own experiences. I recognized that some of the things I believed about myself had been with me for a very long time. I had accepted certain ideas about who I was without really questioning whether they were true. And because those beliefs had become so familiar, they influenced how I received what other people said about me. If someone offered encouragement that didn’t line up with the way I saw myself, I had a difficult time allowing it to mean anything. I could hear their words, appreciate their kindness, and still walk away believing the same things I had believed before the conversation.

I’ve spent time working through some of those experiences with people I trust, including counselors, coaches, and mentors who have helped me recognize things I probably wouldn’t have seen on my own. Some of that work has been uncomfortable because it has required me to look at parts of my life that I had learned to move past without necessarily understanding how they continued to affect me. And recognizing something doesn’t mean it immediately stops influencing you.

There are still moments when an old thought shows up, even when I know it isn’t an accurate reflection of who I am. I’ve had to learn to recognize those moments without automatically accepting the thought as true. Sometimes that means allowing myself to sit with someone’s encouragement instead of immediately finding a reason to dismiss it.

As I’ve worked through this, I’ve started recognizing how easily those same struggles can affect my relationship with God. I grew up learning about God’s love. I’ve read the parts of the Bible about His grace, His forgiveness, and what it means to become His child. I believe ALL of those things. I know that salvation is a gift I could never earn and that my standing with God isn’t something I can secure through being a good enough man.

But knowing those things and being able to rest in them haven’t always been the same experience for me. I’ve noticed how easily I can approach my time with God thinking about everything I need to work on. I pray about becoming a better husband, father, leader, and follower of Jesus. I ask Him to help me recognize where I’m falling short and to give me wisdom to respond differently. But there have been times when I’ve become so focused on what God is changing in me that I’ve struggled to simply receive His love for me.

I can spend time reading Scripture and immediately begin thinking about what I need to do with what I’ve read. I can pray and find myself evaluating whether I’ve been faithful enough or whether I’m making the progress I should be making. Even when I spend time with God, I can approach that relationship with the same mindset I bring to so many other areas of life. I’m looking for something I need to accomplish or improve. And I’ve been wondering what that says about how comfortable I really am being loved.

I think there’s a part of me that has been more familiar with being useful than simply being cared for. I understand responsibility. I know what it means to show up when someone needs me, to work through a problem, or to help carry something that’s become too heavy for another person. I find meaning in those things, and I believe God has given me opportunities to serve people in ways that matter. But when I’m not doing anything for someone, when there’s nothing I need to accomplish or contribute, I sometimes have a harder time knowing what to do with the relationship.

I’ve wondered whether other men experience that too. Maybe you’ve spent much of your life being the person everyone depends on. You’re accustomed to being asked for help, offering advice, making decisions, or being the one who stays steady when things become difficult. Over time, those responsibilities can become such a normal part of your life that you don’t spend much time considering what happens when someone wants to care for you.

Do you appreciate a gesture but feel uncomfortable receiving it? Or someone asks how you’re doing, and you give them a quick answer before moving the conversation back toward them. You might not even realize you’re doing it. I certainly didn’t for a long time.

There is an interaction between Jesus and Peter in John 13. Jesus was sharing a meal with His disciples when He got up, wrapped a towel around His waist, and began washing their feet. It was the kind of work normally done by a servant, and Peter struggled with the idea of Jesus doing that for him. When Jesus came to Peter, he questioned what He was doing and eventually told Him that he would never wash his feet. Jesus responded, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.”

There’s much more happening in that passage than Peter being uncomfortable receiving an act of service. Jesus was showing His disciples something about humility, the cleansing they needed from Him, and the way they were to love and serve one another. I don’t want to reduce that moment to a lesson about accepting kindness. But truthfully, I keep thinking about Peter’s resistance.

Peter had left his life behind to follow Jesus. He wanted to be faithful to Him, and throughout the Gospels, we see how willing he was to speak up or act when he believed something needed to be done. Yet in this moment, Jesus was doing something for Peter that he couldn’t do for himself, and Peter initially refused to receive it. I wonder how often I approach my relationship with God more comfortably when I’m doing something for Him than when I’m simply allowing myself to receive what He’s already given me.

I don’t mean that God’s love depends on my ability to receive it. He loved me long before I understood what that meant, and His faithfulness isn’t determined by how well I respond to Him. But I do think the things we believe about ourselves can make it difficult to live in the reality of that love. For me, some of those beliefs have been deeply familiar. They shaped the way I saw myself and influenced what I expected from other people. And when I brought those same expectations into my relationship with God, I sometimes found myself relating to Him as though I needed to become someone better before I could really rest in His love.

I knew that wasn’t what the Bible taught. But there were parts of my life where I was still learning to believe it personally. Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3 has hit me harder as I’ve been working through this. He prays that believers would be rooted and established in love and that they would have the strength to grasp how wide and long and high and deep the love of Christ is. He prays that they would know this love that surpasses knowledge.

These were people who already believed in Jesus. They had heard the gospel and knew something about the love of God. Yet Paul was praying that they would come to know that love more deeply. There are things I know about God that I’m still learning how to live in. I can explain grace to someone else and genuinely believe what I’m saying, yet struggle to extend that same understanding toward myself when I’m disappointed in something I’ve done. I can encourage another man to rest in his identity as a son of God while still catching myself acting as though I need to make more progress before I can be comfortable in my own relationship with the Father. I don’t think that means what I believe is insincere. I think it means there are parts of me that God is still forming, including the way I understand His love for me. And I’ve been realizing that receiving love sometimes requires me to stop arguing with what is being offered.

When someone encourages me, I don’t have to immediately explain why they shouldn’t think so highly of me. I can recognize that they may see something good in me even while knowing there are areas where I still need to grow. Both can be true. I can be a man who has made mistakes, who still struggles, and who has plenty of growing left to do, while also being someone worthy of love and care.

Sometimes I think we become so familiar with our own shortcomings that we assume anyone who sees something good in us must not know us very well. We know the thoughts we’ve wrestled with, the things we’ve said that we regret, and the ways we’ve disappointed ourselves or others. When someone speaks kindly about us, we measure their words against everything we know about ourselves.

But maybe part of learning to receive love is becoming willing to believe that someone can know us, including the unfinished parts, and still genuinely care about us. I’ve had to learn that in my relationships with other people, and I’m still learning it in my relationship with God. There have been times when someone has offered to help me with something, and my first instinct has been to assure them I’ve got it handled. It’s not always pride working in those moments, but sometimes I simply didn’t know how to be on the receiving end of the kind of care I was accustomed to giving.

I’ve been trying to pay attention to those moments. When someone offers encouragement, I’m learning to thank them without immediately redirecting the conversation. When someone wants to know how I’m doing, I’m trying to be more willing to give an honest answer rather than the answer that keeps the conversation comfortable. And when someone offers help, I’m learning that accepting it doesn’t mean I’ve failed to carry my responsibilities.

There are times when I can feel myself becoming uncomfortable and recognize the old response before it comes out of my mouth. Other times I don’t notice until afterward. But I think the fact that I’m beginning to recognize those moments matters. It gives me an opportunity to respond differently rather than simply continuing a pattern I’ve lived with for years.

I’ve also come to appreciate how important it is to have people in my life who know me well enough to recognize some of those patterns. There are things I’ve learned about myself through conversations with other men who were willing to ask questions and give me room to answer honestly. Some of those conversations have helped me understand experiences from my past that I hadn’t fully connected to the way I was living in the present. I don’t think we were meant to figure all of this out alone.

I wonder whether part of the difficulty for some of us is that we’ve become so accustomed to being the person who helps others that we rarely give anyone the opportunity to know what we’re carrying. If we were talking this out together, I think I’d be interested in hearing what your experience has been with that. I wouldn’t want to assume that your story looks like mine or that the things I’ve struggled with are necessarily things you’ve experienced. But I would be curious about what happens when someone turns their attention toward you and genuinely wants to know how you’re doing.

I think I would have struggled with that kind of conversation more than I realized a few years ago. I was comfortable talking about what I was learning or what I was doing, but it was harder to talk about the parts of my life where I felt uncertain, discouraged, or in need of someone else’s care. I’m still learning how to make room for those conversations and I’m learning to make room for that same kind of honesty with God.

There are days when I come to Him with things I need to confess, decisions I need wisdom for, or areas of my life where I know I need to change. I don’t expect those days to disappear. Following Jesus will always involve growth, repentance, and learning to obey Him in ways I haven’t before. But I’m also learning that I don’t have to make every moment with Him about what needs to be fixed.

Sometimes I need to spend time with Him without trying to accomplish anything. I need to be willing to bring Him the parts of my life that are still unfinished and trust that He isn’t surprised by what He finds there. He already knows the things I’m struggling to understand about myself, including the experiences that have made receiving love difficult. That’s becoming an important part of what it means for me to live as His son.

I still want to grow. I want to love people well, take responsibility for my life, and become more like Christ in the way I treat others. But I’m starting to understand that I don’t have to wait until I’ve become that man to receive the love of my Father. That’s something I need to spend more time allowing myself to experience rather than simply trying to understand.

I’m not sure I know how to do that consistently yet. Some days I find it easier than others. There are moments when I slip back into measuring myself by what I’ve accomplished or how well I’ve handled something. But I’ve started noticing those moments for what they are, and I’m learning to return to what God has already said about me.

I belong to Him.