Love
Part One: Family
“But if anyone does not
provide for his own, especially for those of his household, he has denied the
faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” 1 Timothy 5:8
Hello and welcome! Today
is a very exciting day because this is the first part of a series I will be
doing for the month of February. Not only that, but this is the first
series I’ve EVER done so I’m very excited.
I’ve seen other bloggers
do this and I’ve wanted to do a series for a while, but I wasn’t sure what it
would be about. I needed a topic that I would be able to cover in
multiple posts and something that I’m passionate about . It came to me
while I was lying in bed one night. I was thinking about Valentine’s Day
and brainstorming for ideas of what I could write about for my blog. Then
I thought “what if instead of one post, I make a series for Valentine’s Day?”
So here I am now. Over the next few weeks
we will:
- Look at what is love according to the Bible
- Look closely at different connections with people in
your life
- Examine what it means to be loved by others
- Examine what it means to be loved by God
This series will be
weekly, so there will be a new blog post up every Sunday. Also,
feel free to start a discussion in the comments. I would love to hear
from you!
Now let’s finally dive
into this thing called love. We’re going to start by defining love.
First, let’s see what the dictionary has to say about it.
Love- an intense
feeling of deep affection
Does
this definition surprise you? I think it gets pretty close to the point.
After all, love is a feeling, right?
The thing is feelings are
different for everyone. People also express feelings differently. Have
you ever heard of someone talk about “love languages”? Love languages are
how each person expresses love. For an example, someone might perform an
act of kindness, like doing the dishes for your parents or cleaning the house
for your wife. If you like to do things
like that, that would be your love language. Some might like to give their loved
ones gifts. That’s also an expression of
love and a love language.
Some other common forms of
showing affection (love language):
- Words of affirmation
- Physical touch
- Quality time
Leave a comment below and let
me know what your love language is! I’d love
to know.
Now
that we’ve talked about what love is and learned about the love languages, I
think it’s time to talk about the real first topic in this series: family. I put family first because that’s obviously
higher on the list than some of the others.
Why? Because your family are the
people who share your blood, who share your same last name (in most cases),
that you probably live with, that you’ve grown up with. Your family is probably the people you spend
the most time with. And let’s be real,
we all get annoyed with our family sometimes.
Okay, maybe a lot more often than sometimes. But that just goes to show that even families
aren’t perfect.
What
saddens me is that there are so many families that are torn apart in some
way. Most of the time this is caused by
the parents. Divorce rates are extremely
high these days, and the worst part about divorce is that it affects the
children just as much as the marriage.
Children with divorced parents usually are more distrusting and tend to
be more aggressive towards their peers (clearly this is not the case for
everyone). There are other things that can tear families apart such as the
military, and busy jobs or jobs with a lot of traveling.
A
strong, healthy family is centered around God.
The Bible says in Joshua 24:15, “as for me and my household, we will
serve the Lord.” If a family serves and
honors the Lord, they will have a firm foundation in their home.
Love
takes patience, especially when it comes to family. That’s why I think the two values go hand in
hand. I’ll be talking a lot about
patience in this series, so get used to it now.
It’s just almost like you can’t have one without the other. Just as it says “love is patient”. It takes a patient person to love, and love
requires a lot of patience sometimes.
Your
family should come before anything else in your life, next to your relationship
with the Lord. It’s something that you
should treasure and put effort into. Not
every family is perfect, but if you put God in the center and foundation of
your relationship with your family, He will bless you with good things in your
life.
