What would you say you aspire to be when people speak about you. My first thought was, loved. I thought one of our main purposes in life was to be loved. Find their partner and love them and be loved by them at least once in their life. And if you’re lucky early in their life and for a whole lifetime. For me this has always been something I not only thought about but fantasize about. As I was reading the other day this quote came up that really rattled my mind, “How lovely it feels to be liked. One tended to imagine sometimes that only being loved was of any significance. But there was something enormously touching, something genuine, about being told that one was liked”. This got me thinking, maybe we have been substituting “loved” with “like” and not realizing how valuable being liked really is to us all. I believe we all want to be loved, most likely by a select few, our partner, friends and family. Yet we want to be liked by all. Think back to anytime you meet someone new, or walk into a room full of strangers. When we leave that room and the people there think back to us our instinct is “I want to be liked by someone”.
I want you to close your eyes and think back to a time when someone told you they liked you or made you feel liked. Now take notice to how your mind feels, your body, now think about your soul and how that feels. Without noticing I am smiling not just with my mouth but my whole face, which feels like it lights my whole body up, to stand proud and tall. Something changes within you when someone notices you, with all the bad, ugly, good and beautiful that makes up you. Fear goes away because you are a little more confident with that one person by your side. Someone saying they like you when you are just being yourself is like someone is looking completely at you and wants to be around you to see more. They respect you and see the quality of you. We all deserve to be liked. Learning how to like yourself and others is the training wheels to being able to love.
It’s safe to say we all have fallen short of liking everyone and being liked by all. Take comfort in Jesus in those times, for he says we will not be liked by all in this world. The perfect man wasn’t liked by all and neither willl we. But in those times we think back to the people that do like us. The ones that celebrate our corkiness and differences. And remember the next time you have the opportunity to meet someone, find something to like about them and tell them. You might just be their memory when they need to close their eyes and think back to when someone saw them.
Go out and like someone today!