I had a realisation that most love is selfish love. And if you truly love someone, you’ll love them for them. Not for the person you want them to be.

Loving a person means accepting them for who they are despite our expectations. To see that their unique qualities and personality is what make them themselves. Love cannot prevail if we constantly drown it with our own selfish motives.

Eventually, we find ourselves feeling alone and distanced from everyone we wish to be close to. And all that’s left is a quiet realisation that our selfish love is not actually love. Trying to fit people into the molds we’ve created for them is inevitably going to fail, for their differences are what makes us love them in the first place. People cannot be fit into molds. If you continue to try, all that you’ll have left is broken clay and a silent room. And silence speaks volumes.

What I’ve begun to see is that people are unique and that’s what makes them so wonderful. Their souls are beautiful. Their smiles remarkable. Their stories are worth cherishing. People aren’t ours to mold. We are not the potters.

“But now, o Lord, you are our father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.” Isaiah 64:8

God created us one by one. He knew us before we were born; and made us with a special purpose unique to us. Unique to our lives and our talents that He gave us.

So tell me, how can we compete with God? It might be a strange question, or one that we think doesn’t apply to us; hear me out: how many times have we looked at our own selves, our bodies, even our minds, and thought that we were inadequate? Incomplete? Felt that something needed changing?

How many times have we seen one of God’s precious daughters and criticised her for being herself, when that was who God intended her to be?

How many times have we looked down on God’s precious sons and deemed him unworthy for the very lives the Lord created them to live?

We unintentionally compete with God and think that what He made beautiful should be tweaked or changed to fit the standards or expectations we’ve created. But we can’t love people by changing them.

God is love. That means looking to Him for how we should love others. 1 John 4:16 says, “And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.”

God is love.

And that same loving God is the one who made you. And the one who made me.