DEVOTION: February 1

It’s officially February, and the theme for the month is BE LOVED. We’ve found a rhythm for our devotions, we think, that works well for the season we’re in: daily devotions for the first seven days of the month, then move to a weekly devotion and daily journaling questions. We hope these devotions and questions encourage you to pause and reflect, to slow down and process.

Thank you for spending time with us as we journey toward fully understanding what it is to BE LOVED.

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We love love, don’t we? We make movies about it and write songs about it, we ache to feel it and also ache to give it. We have a holiday marked to celebrate it, assign it colors like pink and red, and write poems with rhyming words just to attempt to express the depth of it.

Oh how we love love.

It’s interesting, then, how we get love so wrong, so often. It seems what we really do is romanticize love and over-romanticize it, then set expectations for it based on those over-romanizations that we initially got from those movies and songs we first heard about it.

Because real love doesn’t get to skip out on apologies. It doesn’t need another person to complete you and sometimes it does mean letting go. It doesn’t look for what it can get before what it can give. Real love doesn’t ignore another’s pain because it’s an inconvenient feeling or time. It doesn’t mistreat, abuse and harm in its name again, and again, and again.

Until we truly understand what real love actually is, and WHO Love is – until we embrace the One who first loved us – we’ll never be able to fully love others in return, the way they should be loved. The way He expects us to.

Our journey this month is to fully explore what it means to Be Loved. To sit in the love of God and fully embrace what it looks like to experience perfect love. Some of us may have earthly examples of this love, but others may have experienced a misguided, misrepresented love. Our prayer is that at the end of February you have a more holy, true and righteous view of who Love really is.

Do you have any misconceptions that you’ve called love in the past? Maybe you’ve confused lust or infatuation with love. Maybe you’ve been led to believe that is so passionate it can sometimes hurt you. Maybe love has been misrepresented by earthly parents. Be open to how God might be speaking to you that His love is different. Journal a prayer to Him asking Him to show you His true and perfect love over the course of the next few weeks.

“Love is large and incredibly patient. Love is gentle and consistently kind to all. It refuses to be jealous when blessing comes to someone else. Love does not brag about one’s achievements nor inflate its own importance. Love does not traffic in shame and disrespect, nor selfishly seek its own honor. Love is not easily irritated or quick to take offense. Love joyfully celebrates honesty and finds no delight in what is wrong. Love is a safe place of shelter, for it never stops believing the best for others. Love never takes failure as defeat, for it never gives up.” (1 Corinthians 13:4-7, The Passion Translation)