Lately I’ve been reflecting on how I often expect to receive love in a certain manner. As I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve come to the realization that I have been missing a lot of people expressions of love and appreciation to me.
Let me give you some examples….
1) I know that I am a very prideful and a somewhat independent person. I don’t like to have people do things for me. It’s as simple as my wife has just cooked a meal and she asks me if she can fill my plate and I have a hard time letting her. There isn’t a real reason that I don’t want her to fill my plate. I just feel I should do it. This sounds silly but I’ve began to wonder if I’m squelching my wife’s desire to show love to me through a simple act of kindness. I think I might.
2) My daughter, Ruth, is at that playful age where sometimes she wants to be cuddly and sometimes she doesn’t. As a dad, it can sometimes just make my heart sink when I pick her up and ask her for a hug and kiss and she throws a fit and reaches for mommy. My expectations of how I wanted to experience her love were just shot down. What I forget is that I just interrupted her play and she wants to get back to it. I also seem to forget how when I walked in the door from work about a hour ago, she stopped what she was doing ran over to me and wanted me to pick her up and hold her.
3) My son, Malachi, at 4 isn’t talking yet. I long for the day that I hear him say, “Daddy, I love you.” I have to be careful because sometimes I get so caught up in longing for that expression of love that I forget to recognize the times that he climbs up in my lap, gives me a big hug, looks me straight in the eye, and then gives me a kiss.
All this to say, I miss my own wife and kids trying to let me know how much they love me all the time because I’m looking for it in a different form. I wonder how many others (friends, family, and even God) try to show how much they care about me but I miss it because my eyes are too tunnel visioned. Somehow, my heart and mind need to be opened a little wider to recognize the way people love and appreciate me even when it doesn’t look like I expect it to.
I realize that God created each of us differently with different needs on how we experience love the best. I know I experience love the most through words of affirmation and gifts; however, I miss a lot if I only value and recognize the love that comes my way in these forms.
