Mirrors and Magnets: Breaking the Self-Love Culture
Culture is heavy pressed to teach us self-love. Open your eyes and it’s everywhere. We are obsessed with learning to love ourselves.
In less popular opinion, we posit that self-love is a lie - a delusion, a fallacy, a deception. Self-love is the culture of self-centeredness, or selfishness, masked in wispy fonts, floral journal covers and rousing conversation about the “true self.” Of course, this doesn’t feel as fuzzy and warm, but Truth is not measured by the subjective ways we feel about a thing.
The only way to discover your True identity will come through awareness of your intended creation, not self-created love. There is no balance of Ego and self-love; they side the same.
The fact is, you are created to love. You are created for love. But you are not created to be the originator of that love. Human beings were created for relationship and the podium of self-love is a place of isolation. Humans were created with an innate longing for relationship with the Creator and when we live outside of the awareness to this fact, we will seek to fill this longing with other things and people that can never satisfy what our soul craves for in knowing the timeless and boundless love of Jesus Christ. These patterns become the cycles of life we can never seem to escape.
“But you can’t serve from an empty cup,” they will tell you.
No, you cannot.
“And neither will you ever be able to fill that cup yourself with enough capacity to serve others in the ways for which you are designed. By this theory, you will only ever be filled and thirsty or emptied out and wanting. The assumption here is that energy is limited and must be collected and spent with all natural and practical reason: take first, give second. One way in, one way out.”
But in relationship with God, we have another resource and another perspective: to be a fountain. A fountain always pours out and yet always remains filled. The outpouring flow invites an incoming stream and the cycle never ceases. To be filled with the love of Christ is to be like a fountain - to overflow from a place of knowing who you are and being endlessly open to the Love that awaits. It is endless, never ceasing and without limit.
“Then why do I feel so tired when I give?”
Perhaps the problem is not that you are not loving yourself fully or often enough, perhaps the issue is that you do not know yourself well enough. And though time alone is absolutely important and something we are also intended for, the most effective way that we can get to know ourselves is in observing our own interactions with other people. We see in other people what we see in ourselves. We deny in other people what we deny in ourselves. Like mirrors and magnets, the relationships we choose and reject have far more to do with our own inner workings than they are about the subject we are looking at. When we get real about this, our self-awareness replaces the need for self-love.
This process will honor and reward the meek and the humble. To look at “your” problem and realize where they are “my” problems forces me to either change my own perception or place blame. Although blame is easy, it is heavy; forgiveness is difficult, yet it is light. Blame will drag behind me like a prison chain, continuing to pose the same problems, same situations and same people into my life over and over again, becoming more bitter at humanity itself and thus seeking more for myself. Forgiveness permits freedom from circumstance or state so that I can see even the troubles within others as permission to see my own and grow in grace and gratitude yet.
If self-love were my perception, instead I might see this: I see your troubles, your anger, your complaints and maybe even your pain. I may hold space for them, I may see that you just need love yourself, but I will need to take care of myself first. As I go to “collect” this love through being alone, meditation, rituals, etcetera, not only have I chosen to ignore you in the moment I recognized your need, but I continue to let you remain there until I myself dictate that you can be helped or deserve a friend alongside. I become the judge of what you need. Perhaps before that, I encounter someone else who I judge needs my self-collected bank of love more than you. Eventually, I forget you and so does everybody else.
It would be easiest at this point in this scenario, if instead of helping you I just recommend that you try self-love, too. But I fail to recognize that the fundamental root of your pain has to do with broken relationship which can only be healed with healthy relationship. I fail to admit that I might be just as broken for relationship, too.
Hear this correctly: this is not a justification to stay in an unhealthy or abusive relationship.
“The narrative of forgiveness should not be warped into a trap of manipulation. But it also cannot be discounted because of this potential for abuse. Forgiveness, on the human level, is a one-time payment of a debt on behalf of another. It’s an opportunity for a single transaction in which I give grace to you in an area of your life so that I can move forward and grow in my own narrative of it. Beyond that, it is left to a Grace far greater than you or I are called to give.”
That grace, that Grace that extends beyond what we can see, give or comprehend, is found in the salvation of Jesus. To know Love is to experience a glimpse of what is beyond our Self when we choose to step outside of our obsession, leaning and inclination for self-centeredness. If you want to learn Love, learn about an extraordinarily simple man named Jesus.
We are mirrors and magnets, always reflecting and drawing near to those who are in need of us or who we ourselves are in need of. This does not make us weak, dependent creatures - this makes us human in living for the relationships that turn empty jars into fountains.
