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As I walk with my sweet granddaughter, Lilian, through the parks, we walk hand in hand. I take time to play and listen to her stories or discoveries, and make every effort to fill her deepest heart with a sense that she is beloved to her Queenie, the grandmother name my children assigned to me (from a favorite series.). As I am with her, a memory and longing often arises from my own childhood, where I remember longing for love and intentional attention..
Cartoon suitcase in hand, stuffed with my pajamas, a favorite teddy and small items I considered essential as a little girl, I marched into our den and announced loudly that I was running away from home to find a place where someone would play with me and be my friend. Oddly, I can still feel what I felt those many years ago, (or perhaps it has expanded in my memory!
I know my mother was a committed mama in her own way and at a different time in history, but I always had a longing to share my heart more, to be understood, to know that I was ok as I was, even if I did not change.
A deep hunger for attention, to have the eyes and focus of someone had been mounting deep in my heart for some time. Longing for deep love and affection,, for someone to talk to, someone to notice, a person who liked me, someone to make me feel seen was a feeling that lay underneath my little girl heart for as many years as I can remember. That longing was even what eventually led me to search for God when I was 18.
My mother & father sat reading their newspapers, (perhaps the last generation’s iPhones) and my older brothers were building some elaborate structure out of toys, ignoring my little stomping foot. I had supposed I would make a dramatic impact on them, but no one paid attention to me. My mother eventually, casually got up from her chair and murmured, “Do you want a snack to eat?” And my expectations of stirring up attention, sympathy, died on the spot, but the memory lasted a lifetime as a deep longing that no one understood.
My mother was from a different time in history and I know that she invested in my life the way she knew how to do. Yet, there was a deep desire, still, to have an assurance of her love in my little-girl heart.
We are all a bundle of couplex emotions and unique personalities. And yet, all of us were pre-wired with a longing to be loved, understood, appreciated, intimate with others who know us and our inner most secrets and share our dreams and our burdens. We hunger deeply for community and to have a place to “belong” is a part of our DNA from the design of God Himself.
Unfortunately, along the way, we stuff our need for such love, become busy or preoccupied and learn to be “unemotional” and unexpressive as we walk through our days.
When babies fail to receive the attention, physical affection and love they were prewired to receive, they soon fail to thrive and often die. If it was a need for infants to be loved in such a way, it is still a deep need of adults. It is a part of being human. Yet in the swirl of busyness, crowds of people, we can placate, cover over, rush beyond this deep down God-given desire, but often the scars of being ignored or neglected are still deep inside where few can see, and we set up barriers or walls that keep us from getting hurt.
I chose for my first word of this project “love” as the attribute we most need to embrace and cultivate. Though it may seem obvious that as those who would express God’s nature in our world, love is the most profoundly important concept, it is especially meaningful as as mothers, as our love lays the groundwork for emotional health and strength the rest of their lives. Love is also the foundation upon which our children build their view of God.
Hundreds of times, love is mentioned in the Bible. It is the pinnacle of the greatest commandments,
Jesus said it summed up all of the essence of the Law given through Moses and covered all of the issues of the prophets: do not have love, that we are to Love God and love our neighbor. (Matthew 22: 37-39)
If we live breathing the very depth of God’s love for ourselves every day, we come to understand that God’s love is essential to our understanding of Him, His heart for us, what drove Him to the cross, what He longs to share with us every day. Love is the essence of God’s very character. The more we understand it and express it, the more like Him we will be.
God’s love is called Agape. It is a greek word in the New Testament, considered the love of God for humans. In Scripture, the transcendent agape love is the highest form of love, from a father to His children.
Join me in my podcast today as I elaborate on many verses that speak about God’s unconditional and steadfast love as a model for what we are to grow into..
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