Created to Be Loved

February is the month of love, and I’m not ashamed to admit I like to get a little cheesy. Michael’s and my first Valentine’s Day was when we were engaged. He made me dinner in our apartment he had already moved into. Since we didn’t have furniture yet, we sat on pillows on the floor and used a cardboard box as a table. Adorable, right?

But I know Valentine’s Day isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, especially if your experience of love is less butterflies and roses and more heartache and disappointment. 

Sometimes, our disappointment with love begins not with our first romantic heartbreak but with our parents. Why? Because the first example of love we have when we come into this world is the love of our parents, and that can be either really good or really not good. 

For some, this parental love came in snuggles and safety. For others, love meant control, anger, and the expectation of perfection. And unfortunately, if we don’t heal those wrong definitions of love (even the sneaky ones that came in through really good parents who simply aren’t perfect all the time), we perpetuate them in our adult relationships. 

The experience of love I received from my father was that love expects me to be the fixer. And if I couldn’t fix, if I couldn’t fill my dad’s emptiness (which I couldn’t), then I wouldn’t (and didn’t) get the love I desperately, and naturally, craved. That obviously led to poor relationship choices as I got older. Eventually, I had enough. I told God that I didn’t want to meet my husband because I needed healing first. I needed to be fulfilled by the love of my Father. 

One day, I was worshipping to a song by Amanda Cook and Steffany Gretzinger called “Pieces,” a powerful ballad defining what God’s love is and isn’t. It’s a song that confronts and corrects wrong definitions of love that you, knowingly or unknowingly, placed on God.  And through that, the Lord began to show me a picture. 

I saw myself as a baby, lying in a hospital room on the day I was born. On one side of the room was my dad with a big hole in his heart, ecstatic that I was born because he believed his emptiness was finally going to be fixed through me. 

On the other side of the room was the Father. He didn’t have a hole in His heart. Rather, His heart was overflowing. His joy sprang from being able to pour out His love on me. 

Then He said, “Sarah, you were not created to fill someone else. You were created because I am overflowing with love, and I wanted to pour it out on someone, so I made you. You were created to be loved.”

In that moment, something deep in my soul began to heal. I wept, the deep-cries-to-deep kind of weeping. And I felt, for the first time in my life, the love I had been longing for. The kind that comes only from God. The kind that anchors us. The kind from which everything else flows.  

It’s not weakness to need to be loved. It’s not embarrassing to want love. It’s beautiful. It’s who you are. But it has to start in your Heavenly Father.

God is love, and we were made in His image, so we were made in the image of Love Himself. Every part of us was designed for love. And that’s not cheesy. That’s just truth. 

I think if God were to give you a Valentine, here’s what it would say: 

My love, you were created to be loved by Me. You are a vessel meant to carry and overflow in My love. There is nothing you have to do to earn it or deserve it. You have been loved from the moment I thought of you, and you will be loved forever and ever. 

I encourage you to take a moment today and ask the Holy Spirit to reveal if there’s any lie you believe about what love is. Then put on a worship song (you can use “Pieces”!) and ask Him to heal the root of where that lie came from and replace it with the truth. You’ll discover there’s no better Valentine than your Heavenly Father—and His love is already yours.