Love can't be earned….it is given.

So…this past week God has turned over tables and revealed a major lie that I had been believing.

I wrote a blog a while back about grace and how hard it was for me to understand grace.  The fact that it can't be earned always has boggled me.  Then, I won a car and God used that car to help me understand his grace a little more.  If you haven't read it…check it out here. 

So, this whole time I've been trying to work this out with my relationship with God.  Yet, it was revealed I had been believing similar lies when it came to relating to people.

I've had a lot of friendship problems in my life.  I would get a friend and then we would fight and no matter how hard I tried we would seem to not ever be the same again.  There was a season of my life where just about every friend and I had broken up and I didn't know what was wrong.  Every situation was different, and every fight was different.  Yet, the only common denominator was me.  It was then I started believing how much of an awful friend I was.

I also would let my friends blame me, because if I was such a bad friend then I must have done something wrong.

To this day, I would never mind taking the blame because I'm so hard on myself anyway that one more negative thought about myself isn't going to hurt right?

Then, I started dating this guy.  I wasn't the most perfect girlfriend, but I tried a lot of things to be a good girlfriend.  I wrote him notes, gave him gifts and spent as much time with him as I could.  I was forgiving and loving.  Yet, the only reason why I did have these things was because I was trying to earn his love. I had made lots of mistakes in the relationship and so I would try to earn his forgiveness or earn his love by doing all these things.

Yet, even after all this He didn't love me.  So, we broke up.

After, the break-up we had a heart to heart in which I confessed that I blame myself…just like I had always blamed myself before.  I told him that it was easier to blame myself and just believe that I could have done more and should've done more rather than believe that it was his fault and that he just didn't love me.

Then, he did an amazing thing.  He told me that I couldn't earn love, but instead love is given.

It's not my loss that he didn't love me or forgive me, it's his loss!!

That statement has sense reverberated in my mind as I play through the years of my friendships and realize I was trying to earn their love the whole time and that's why in the end I had always seen it as my fault.

I remember standing outside someones door with a bucket of ice-cream trying to earn their forgiveness.
Asking for forgiveness but nothing changed.

Nothing that I did changed the way things ended.  Yet, love is not about what is done, it's about the heart of the matter.

If they don't forgive me, it's on them.  Not me!! It's not about what I did, it's about what they didn't do.

I know this may sound harsh, but I'm tired of taking the blame for things that aren't my fault.   I know I'm not perfect and there are things I can work on but I can't earn their forgiveness and I'm tired of trying.

Love is a gift and that's why I'm so thankful for my roommates now.  For even though, I don't always clean my room or keep quiet while they are studying.  They have chosen to love me, and that gift means more to me now that I know it could have never been earned.