You get one life to live. Just one. No dress rehearsal. This is it. How do you feel about yours right now?

Do you find yourself jealous of other people’s lives? You don’t have to be.

You can love your life. Do you believe it?

What does it mean to love your life?

I’ll get to that, but first let’s start with where you are right now.

Your life and who you are today is partly due to how you grew up. How much money you did or didn’t have, where you went to school, if and how church played a role, how you were treated by the people in your childhood, etc. All of these things are important components in how you became who you are right now.

But they don’t’ have the final say.

Whether you love how you were raised or not, you can start to love your life today. Loving your life is the only way for you to live the best life possible. No one can do it for you, but I will show you how.

Your life is yours alone so loving it is up to you.

WHAT IT MEANS TO LOVE YOUR LIFE

There will be things in your life that you won’t like. That’s not being negative, it’s just reality.

No one’s life circumstances are perfect. A pain-free life is an illusion.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t love your life.

When I’m talking about loving your life, I’m not talking about loving the circumstances or having fun. I’m talking about your very life – loving who you are.

Who are you?

You are an amazing creation of God. A human soul created in the likeness of your creator with a spirit that comes alive when reconnected to his life source through Jesus. God wants you to love your life.

What does this mean?

• To love your life is to see its value.
• To love your life is to see its potential.
• To love your life is to honor and respect the gift of life you hold.
• To love your life is to recognize the preciousness of the gift God has given you.
• To love your life is to esteem it how God does.

Loving your life because its precious to God actually honors Him.

WHAT IS TRUE

As I said, God wants you to love your life. I didn’t always believe that.

There was a time when I believed the lie that loving my life was sinful. I believed I shouldn’t have been born. I believed the self was a part of me I was supposed to kill. I believed God loved other people but didn’t love me. And the list goes on…

I believed a lot of lies.

Those lies imprisoned me to misery. I watched others as they loved their lives. It was horribly painful because they had something I believed I could never have, but it was another lie.

I believed the lies because I didn’t know what is true.

Lies come from an enemy that wants to destroy us.

But the truth is that God wants us to love our lives and take ownership of them.

TAKE OWNERSHIP OF YOUR LIFE

Loving and owning your life go together. Everything in our lives flows out of love or the lack of it. If we fail to love our lives, we won’t take ownership of them.

When we fail to take ownership, we hand our lives, our destiny, our purpose, our wellbeing, our everything to someone else.

Owning your life goes beyond responsibility. You can be responsible for something without owning it.

Responsibility is a duty or obligation. It can feel oppressive.

For example, there’s a parable Jesus told about three guys and something he called talents.

One of the guys didn’t take ownership of the talent he was given. Instead, he believed a lie. This lie made him afraid. This fear drove him to hide what he was given. The lie caused him to suffer the loss of not only what he’d been given, but he suffered the loss of the blessing that had been planned for him.

Ownership is recognizing your full claim to something and exercising dominion over it.

The other two guys in the same parable took ownership of what they’d been given. They believed the truth and increased what they started with. Their ownership was rewarded not only with keeping all they’d been given, but they were given the even greater blessing that had been planned for them

Owning your life will empower you to grow and increase.

WHOLENESS IS AVAILABLE

As I said, no one’s life is perfect. I suffered multiple traumas growing up that caused me to believe those many lies. Those lies created a lot of fear and I suffered so much loss.

Trauma causes us to lose the sense of ownership of our lives. It feels like the pain owns us, the memories own us, our past owns us… Those are lies. Lies steal. The truth frees.

It’s through taking ownership of each part of your life that you steer your life in the direction of healing. God has loads and loads of grace to help you too.

It’s through loving our lives we have the courage and boldness to walk through hard places to get to the healing and wholeness God has available for us.

Loving and owning your life is how you become whole one piece of truth at a time.

WHAT NEXT

Do you believe you can love your life now? Share in the comments

• Because You Matter – start taking ownership of your life today: here

My story how God set me free: here.

Danielle Bernock

Author, Coach, and Speaker helping men, women, and organizations EMERGE with clear vision of their value, TAKE ownership of their choices, and CHART a path to their promise, becoming Victorious Souls who Embrace The Change from survive to thrive through the power of the love of God

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