Last night, I was reading the devotional for April 30th from Oswald Chamber's classic devotional My Utmost for His Highest. He talked about how love was spontaneous. It is not something that we work up or premeditate for a long time. He talked about how true love flows like a fountain from God & bubbles up out of us to other people.
This really got me thinking. So many times, we find ourselves trying to figure out how to love & how to express love. Sometimes it seems like an obligation to us or our hearts are kept in so much bondage that we cannot receive love ourselves in order to give it out to others.
However, God designed us to freely receive His love & freely give it. When we are grounded in His love, we are able to be ourselves & love flows naturally through the way we express it in our personality.
In the book The Shack, William P. Young writes about the difference between expectation & expectancy. He says that love is fearless but so many times we are afraid to truly love so we try to control the future through expectations. The problem is that when the expectations are unmet, we are dissappointed & even heart broken. However, that is not the way love is intended to be.
Love is supposed to be full of expectancy of what the other person is going to do, & filled with excitement about who that person is. The expectancy of love allows us to enjoy another person for who they are without trying to control them by who we think they should be.
We can even apply this to ourselves as well. So many times, we fail even our own false expectations of ourselves, but when the love of God fills our hearts, we are able to be who God made us to be & live in the way of spontaneous love.
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