A Loving Life (Paul E. Miller)

Heads up, yes this is another self help book, but bare with me on this one. Writing my thoughts for this book turned out to be pretty challenging. I struggled to eloquently put my feelings about it into sentences. Obviously, I know how I feel about it but I don’t know where to start or how to accurately capture my appreciation for it. The hardest part was structuring my thoughts because I’m a very passionate person and once I get started talking about something, I tend to go on these tangents and I overwhelm myself with emotion and basically I just ramble. I’ve read this post what feels like a hundred times and decided this is as good as it’s going to get lol, so I’m sorry about this (extra sorry about throwing in that ‘lol’).

This book was recommended to me by someone whom I consider to be a soul friend. So going into it, I wanted to enjoy every second of it and I did but not in the sense that I was expecting to. As a huge romantic that loves to love, this book was incredibly enlightening. Lately, I have been struggling with what it meant to love. I constantly tell myself that I want to be the person who loves harder, longer and above everything, but of course that’s much easier said than done. It’s easy to love someone who “deserves” to be loved. But I started getting frustrated with what that even meant. Who am I to decide who gets to be loved and who doesn’t? Unconditional love, means just that, unconditional, through imperfection, through the ugly parts that we all have. It’s hard to love someone who hurts you, betrays you, lies to you, etc. This book challenged the way I loved. I had mixed emotions about this book because everything it was telling me about love, I felt like I knew but whether I was applying this in practice was a different story. This book called me out in a way that was refreshing; it was a gentle nudge reminder of the person I want to be rather than a slap in the face.

If you’ve ever read the bible, then maybe you’re familiar with the story of Ruth and Naomi. This book is about their relationship and about the demonstration of hesed love. To put the definition of hesed love in my own words wouldn’t do it justice, but basically it’s the most selfless form of unconditional love. Hesed is giving everything up for another person, it’s not just holding someone’s hand through a journey, it’s fully immersing yourself and making their struggles, your struggles. Miller breaks down the book of Ruth, stopping to explain the importance of hesed and how it’s manifested, as well as it’s importance and impact while also providing examples from his own life. I can’t stress enough how thankful I am that this book was suggested to me, it’s a short 156 page read but it’s content was heavy and I found myself re-reading often. As someone who is very big on love, seeing as it’s a basic human need, I find myself thinking about this book daily, wondering how I can apply hesed to anyone I encounter. While I don’t have this in my immediate possession, I did borrow it from the sweetest person I know so if you’re interested, I’d happily do my best to get it to you!