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I am asking this because I know throughout my youth I was conditioned to believe I was unworthy of love. This was partly due to a troubled childhood, and partly due to church preaching. As a result, I never felt I was worthy of love and brought that perception of "self" into my marriage. I believe that is part of the reason my marriage is over. There were many contributing factors, but I think it is possible that my husband found it difficult to love me due to my own lack of self-confidence. I've been healed quite a lot emotionally in the last 15 years, but that did not save my marriage.
I thought I'd open a new thread and ask if you believe you are worthy of love and if you think all living beings are worthy of love. I say this because my pets who are living beings certainly seem to have a need to be loved. And they are worthy of love. Also, it's interesting how there is so much love of pets even among those who do not feel particularly loving toward humans - perhaps because animals really do not have the capacity to offend us in the way that humans do.
OP - you need to go to the Charles Stanley In Touch web page and listen to the messages for the week. He has been dealing with our needs. One of them was worthiness.
The fact that God used what was most valuable to Him to be the vehicle by which all people are able to have a relationship with Him means that we do have value in God's eyes.
Do I think I am worthy of love or, I will say, God's Love?
It is the core of my life!
I know who I am....that is the starting point.
I am so loved that God is inside of me breathing me, that's how close
He wants to be to me.
I am the apple of His eye, His daughter, His little princess that adores Him,
the daughter of a King...
(...this Magnificent Being beyond imagination that fills me with His Divine Presence)
One of the struggles I have with believing there is a God who loves me is that you have to believe it without being able to feel it. I know, for example, that my daughter loves me and my mother loves me. I can feel their love. I have to choose to take God's love on faith. I cannot FEEL God's love. As a matter of fact, often I think there is something about me he just doesn't like lol. But I wonder if that's just an extension of my feelings from being unloved by anyone in life in general, other than immediate family.
I belong to a theological class given by the Episcopal Church. Reflections often involve metaphors. In an exercise this past week we had to come up with metaphors for 1. Anger and sadness and the feeling of not being able to take anymore--easy, that's my default. One woman claims she is never angry, and she is indeed an upbeat person who can effortlessly see the positive in everything. The other was 2. Joy.
I have no idea what the word Joy means. There was one other person there like me who does not understand the concept of Joy. Others described it as a floating or soaring, light feeling. I just don't know. I have never experienced feeling like that.
The point was that we discussed the possibility that some of us are simply hard-wired to feel or not be able to feel certain emotions, and that affects our spiritual paths.
If the love of God is how it is depicted by those who did not know God, who attributed to God all the evils and atrocities they did themselves in their sacred writings, then I am with you bluecheese, but Jesus Christ who by his life displayed God for how he truly is(in nature and character). There was no fire called down from heaven, no ground opening incidents swallowing up folk, no slaying his enemies, no floods, no fire and brimstone or any such thing....... in fact this Jesus Christ who the fundamentalist believe is part of a trinity God( the same god of the old testament), around the time of his crucifixion being mocked, cursed, abused and nailed to a cross said "Father forgive them they know not what they do"......... how the hell can this man Jesus Christ called the express image of God(the exact representation of his being), be anything remotely like the god depicted by those who did not know him in their sacred writings?.
One of the struggles I have with believing there is a God who loves me is that you have to believe it without being able to feel it. I know, for example, that my daughter loves me and my mother loves me. I can feel their love. I have to choose to take God's love on faith. I cannot FEEL God's love. As a matter of fact, often I think there is something about me he just doesn't like lol. But I wonder if that's just an extension of my feelings from being unloved by anyone in life in general, other than immediate family.
I belong to a theological class given by the Episcopal Church. Reflections often involve metaphors. In an exercise this past week we had to come up with metaphors for 1. Anger and sadness and the feeling of not being able to take anymore--easy, that's my default. One woman claims she is never angry, and she is indeed an upbeat person who can effortlessly see the positive in everything. The other was 2. Joy.
I have no idea what the word Joy means. There was one other person there like me who does not understand the concept of Joy. Others described it as a floating or soaring, light feeling. I just don't know. I have never experienced feeling like that.
The point was that we discussed the possibility that some of us are simply hard-wired to feel or not be able to feel certain emotions, and that affects our spiritual paths.
One of the ways I feel His love is when He meets a need in my life.
Another way to feel the love is the recognition of what He has already provided.
I often think of how a kid feels love from their parents - from the kids' perspective. Sometimes the kid and parent are at odds, and the kid blurts out that the parents doesn't love them because they may not get what they want at that time. The kid has lost sight of everything the parent has done. In other words, the perspective we bring to the table may have a lot to do with why we do or don't feel the love of God.
Joy is a tougher one for me. It seems to be more of a mindset than a emotion or feeling.
Being loved by the Biblical deity would be like being loved by Hitler, only worse!
Given what we know of the OP's spiritual outlook, however, that's not applicable to her thread.
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