00:00 

Hey there, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 299, "Love is Not a Reward." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:23 

Alright, hello there, my friends. Welcome to the podcast. I'm just so glad to have you here with me today. It is March 2024. I started this podcast in March of 2019. Five years of a podcast every single week. In fact, the first six months I put out two a week. Who knew that I would have the capacity to do this? To do something every month, every week for five years. Pretty amazing. And I think sometimes we have the capacity to do things that we don't really believe we have the capacity to do. And I know that you are here learning this content, figuring things out, and I just want you to know you have the capacity to do this. You have the capacity to do things that may seem overwhelming, that may seem too big, that may seem too difficult, but you can do it. If I can do this for five years, I believe that you can do the hard work that you want to do to have your life and your relationships in the place that you want them to be. 

01:40 

So let's jump in, shall we? Today's podcast is called "Love is Not a Reward." And by the way, it's number 299. It's so mind blowing to me. Alright, love is not a reward. So one of my favorite LDS philosophers is a man named Adam Miller. I mentioned him here on the podcast before. He wrote a book called "Original Grace" that just blew my mind, and also about half the time left me confused because he's so deep and complex that some of it just goes way over my head. I've read the book twice and probably need to go back and do it again because his concepts have just touched my heart and made such a difference for me. 

02:26 

One of the concepts that I love that he teaches is that God doesn't give us what we deserve. He gives us what we need. So if we want to learn to love like God does, it's important that we don't look at others as deserving or undeserving of our love, but rather that we learn to look at people and ask ourselves what they need to feel loved and safe. What do they need to move forward in a better way? And this concept has shifted so much in me for the better. I'll be honest, I still have a very long way to go, which is why I continue to do this work as we all have a long way to go, right? This is part of humanity is that we have a long way to go. 

03:10 

So this week I listened to Adam Miller expand on some of the concepts in his book on a podcast called "Faith Matters." It was episode number 203. So "Faith Matters," episode 203, and I loved it so much and I want to share some of his ideas with you. So of course in this podcast, I'll be adding a lot of my thoughts, but please know that the basic concepts for this podcast come from his podcast there. So please reference it if you would like to hear the original source and really know what all is his and what all is mine. It's all so mixed up. It's hard for me to unravel it at this point in my mind, but go there and you can help to figure that out. I would also suggest checking out Adam Miller on YouTube channels or buy one of his books. The one that I've read is "Original Grace," but I know that he's got some others out there. He's really quite brilliant, especially around the topics of God's love and God's grace. 

04:08 

So what we're going to talk about today is about how love is not a reward. And as I go through this, I'd love for you to ask yourself "if love isn't a reward, then what is it?" Okay, so you think about that while I'm going to talk to you. So as I reflect on love being a reward, I don't know that I would have ever really identified that I thought of love as a reward. And yet I can see so much evidence in my life that I have looked at love as a reward. For example, growing up, I interpreted teachings from church in a way that made me think that I had to earn God's love through obeying the commandments. Ideas that God loves his faithful daughters, that He's happy when we're obedient. Ideas that God is disappointed or even angry with us when we sin. Even the concept of tying blessings to our obedience in a roundabout way made me think that God's love, because that seems like a blessing to me, that God's love was conditional on me being compliant to His will. 

05:11 

And I now have very different ideas and a different understanding around God being disappointed or angry when we sin. I kind of don't think He is. I believe He views us with compassion for our struggles to choose better and that He seeks to comfort us and give us what we need, which is love and grace, a safe space to learn and grow into something better. And I don't believe God is ever really disappointed in us either, because disappointment comes from unmet expectations. And God, being omniscient, knows all things. And where all time is before Him, He knows the challenges that are going to come up for me and the choices I'm going to make. And so He doesn't have expectations other than what He already knows. So He doesn't expect me to make any decision other than the ones I made. So He doesn't get disappointed in me. But when we believe that love is a reward, we will absolutely feel that if God is disappointed in us, that He loves us less, which is not true. I'm continuing my understanding of love being a reward. 

06:23 

As a missionary in my 20s, my mission present really pushed the idea that we had to be 100% obedient or we were a failure as a missionary. Now, that's not what he said exactly. But that is how my brain interpreted it. That it was important that I learn to be obedient so that God could bless me and trust me with people to teach the gospel to. Because as I interpreted it in my 20s, I wouldn't get people to teach unless I proved myself worthy. So every month I struggled to find people to teach. I thought I was being punished for not being good enough, obedient enough, and that God was disappointed in me. And I associated that idea of being worthy to being loved by God or lovable by God. 

07:13 

Here's a fascinating thing to me. As I look back on my childhood, I don't remember ever feeling that I needed to earn my parents love or that they would love me less if I wasn't a good person. Their love was always constant and unquestionable for me as a child. And yet, I didn't ever really push boundaries as a child or a teenager, because I've never been really much of a boundary-pusher. But I have to wonder how much of my brain thought that I might lose their love if I made things rough for them, even though I had zero evidence to cause me to think that. I don't know, kind of fascinating to think about how much of my lack of boundary-pushing came from a fear of losing love. I don't know. 

07:56 

And then I got married 23 and it was rough from the very beginning for both of us. Neither of us really knew how to love in a marriage and so we were both in protective mode from the very beginning. My brain started to think that if I was a good wife then he would love me. Now I'm sure that he did love me, but not in the way my brain thought he should. Notice the "should," right? That's always gonna cause problems, but I didn't have the emotional maturity at the time to have a conversation about it. So though I felt lovable in so many areas of my life, to be honest pretty much in every other area of my life, in my marriage I generally felt unlovable. I felt that if I could do things the right way and that if I could just be perfect enough, then he could love me. 

08:48 

So to be clear this is all in my head. This is the story I was making up to make sense of the situation that confused me so much. So probably a lot of this is not factually true. but it's what my brain created to protect me and to make sense of the situation. I'm pretty positive that my previous husband was doing a ton of things that I wasn't seeing or understanding or acknowledging. But in the story that I've created, I felt unloved and as though I needed to be better, even perfect, if I was to be loved and have a better marriage. And that was the narrative I told myself for over 20 years. If I was just good enough, I could be loved. If I was perfect enough, I could be loved. If I was pretty enough or sexy enough or a good mom enough, I could be loved, that I could earn his love. So I've had a lot of years of associating love with being a reward and I will say, it has not served me well. It has created me doing a lot of things out of fear of not being loved or accepted. 

09:49 

When we view love as a reward, we will always find reasons that we don't deserve the love because we are not perfect, we're humans, right? And this drops us into shame. And shame is the inevitable consequence of us trying to earn love and deserve to be loved because there must be something wrong with us if we aren't deserving of love. So remember that shame says there is something inherently wrong with us and never has anything positive to add to our lives. Guilt will say, "I did something wrong." Shame says, "I am wrong. There is something wrong with me." So in fact, shame is always destructive, causing us to question our value and our worth, our lovability, which is ridiculous, though very common to question these things. They are never in question. And when we do question them, they create some pretty dysfunctional feelings and actions in our lives. 

10:48 

So in this podcast that Adam Miller was on, he talked about the parable of the prodigal son and shared this insight: both sons saw love as a reward. The son who left returned thinking himself unworthy of love because of his actions, and the son who stayed saw himself worthy of love because of his actions, where in actuality both of them were wrong. Neither of their actions made them worthy or unworthy of love. When we deem ourselves unworthy of love because of our actions, as the prodigal son did, we hate ourselves. When we deem ourselves worthy of love because of our actions, as the other son did, we hate others. Such amazing insight from Adam Miller. The Father in this parable is the only one who really understands what love is. He genuinely loves each of his sons regardless of what they have or haven't done. His unconditional, clean love is what the parable is about, and that love is not a reward. 

11:57 

Adding to this idea, many of us have the tendency to think we have to be perfect in order to earn love. This was my thought for sure during my previous marriage, and I talked to so many women who have had, and still have, the same thought, that we have to be perfect to be loved. And yet, as Adam Miller points out, perfectionism is the desire to be perfectly lovable, not the desire to love perfectly. And herein lies a huge difference. God is perfect, but God is not a perfectionist. He has the ability to love perfectly, and He recognizes that neither He nor us has to be perfect in order to be loved. Perfectionism is harsh and angry and unloving. Perfectionism withholds love. Having perfectionist tendencies actually keeps us from moving toward greater perfection. It keeps us from growing and progressing. Perfectionism has us behaving in very un-godlike ways as we become judge-y and unkind and unloving to ourselves and to others. 

13:11 

When we see love as something that we are rewarded with for good behavior, we will always see ourselves as falling short because none of us are perfect and have good behavior all the time. When we see love as something other people are rewarded with for good behavior, we will judge them for falling short of perfection. When we struggle in our relationships to treat the other person with kindness, with grace, with compassion, it is because we are seeing that their behavior is not deserving of love, of our love specifically, so we withhold and become less Christlike. 

13:49 

Back to when I said, "ask yourself the question, 'if love is not a reward for good behavior, what is it?'" As Adam Miller teaches, love is actually the law. Love is what we are commanded to do. Remember that Christ taught that the first commandment is to love God, and the second one is to love our neighbor as ourselves. This is the law that every other commandment is hinged on. So if the commandment is to love, not to be loved, what does that mean? Notice the scriptural reference above doesn't say to love our neighbors when they deserve it, when they are good neighbors to us, when they are kind and respectful of our property, when they bring us a meal when we're sick, and they don't yell at our kids when they play on their lawn. The law is just to love your neighbor. So we don't reward our neighbor's good behavior with love. We also don't punish our neighbor's bad behavior by withholding love. We don't reward our children or our spouse with love when they behave well. And we also don't punish their bad behavior by withholding love, or at least that's what the commandment teaches us to do. Remember, they all get to behave however they darn well please, and we are commanded to learn how to love them in whatever behavior they choose to engage in. We are commanded to learn to love our neighbor when they yell at our kids, to love them when they don't like us or care about us, and even to love them if they aren't respectful of our property. Our responsibility is to learn how to love at all times, and in all things, and in all places that we may be in. Love is the law. 

15:39 

So what does that mean then? What implications does this law have on our day-to -day lives? Well, let's start by thinking about how Christ loves. Christ loves everyone, whether they deserve it or not. He loves us when we don't sin, and he loves us when we do sin. He loves us when we are kind to others, and he loves us when we are unkind to others. He loves us when we manage our minds and give others the benefit of the doubt, and he loves us when we say all manner of evil against someone. He loves us when we spend too much money, when we leave the toilet seat up, when we don't load the dishwasher correctly, when we snore, when we don't fill the car up with gas, when we leave our dirty clothes on the floor, and when we don't fold the clean laundry. He also loves us when we do budget our money well, when we do put the toilet seat down, when we do load the dishwasher correctly, sleep soundly and silently, don't let the gas gauge get below half full, when we put our dirty clothes in the hamper, and when we fold the clean laundry warm and right out of the dryer so it doesn't wrinkle. 

16:49 

We are not rewarded with God's love when we do all the "good things." Maybe it feels like it because we are thinking so positively of our behavior that we create positive feelings. When I think, "man, I did a great job with that," that's going to create positive good feelings. But then attaching love to a reward, we will immediately turn around and think poorly of others who don't do all the good things, making us hate others. Christ just loves, regardless of what is going on or what people do or don't do. He just loves. That's a tall order for all of us humans, but it's the first commandment. 

17:34 

So I'm going to say it's pretty important that we start to figure it out. Remember that in the Bible, we are also commanded not to judge others unrighteously, but to judge righteous judgment. So, if we think love is a reward, we will judge others unrighteously, meaning we will judge them based on their behavior, on whether we think they are deserving of good things or not, whether they deserve our love or not. We end up using judgment as a weapon. Righteous judgment, however, treats love as a law that commands me to love them even if, and especially if, they are my enemies, if they are difficult to love. And, my natural human tendency is to believe they don't deserve my love. Unrighteous judgment asks, "who deserves to be loved?" Whereas righteous judgment asks, "how do I love?" There is no question as to whether they deserve my love or not. God's answer to who deserves to be loved is "everyone." God probably never even asks Himself if someone deserves to be loved. I'm sure the very question would leave Him somewhat confused. I see Him responding by saying, "well, what else would you do? What other option is there? All there is is love. That's always what you do. That's always the answer." Does He even understand what it means not to love? I don't know. Maybe He does. But when we're taught that God is love, can He really even understand what it means not to love? 

19:19 

When I see love as a law, instead of asking who deserves to be loved, I ask myself, "how can I love this person? When they show up the way they're showing up, which may be hurtful or unkind, how can I offer love and kindness? How can I accept them? How can I honor their agency to show up that way? How can I control what I can control, which is my ability to extend love?" 

19:47 

Remember when Christ also taught that with what judgment we judge, that that is how we will be judged? When I resist learning the law of love and choose instead to judge unrighteously, I am condemning myself to receive unrighteous judgment as well. Not because God doesn't love me and want all good things for me, but because I have behaved in ways that have natural consequences. And being judged as I judge others is a consequence of my behavior. It's not a punishment from God. It is me choosing the judgment with which I want to be judged. And God does not withhold His love from us when we judge unrighteously. He only honors our request to be judged the way we judge others. And He still loves us. God's divine law only asks how best to love us, and He does that by honoring our agency to judge how we will, knowing that the consequence will be to be judged in kind. 

20:51 

So if we really want to learn the law of love, to love as God does, what does that entail? So here are three of my non inclusive, very imperfect ideas. Meaning, I don't love like God does, but I am trying to live the law of love more often in my life. And here are three ways that helped me move in that direction. 

21:15 

One, embrace agency. When I can really accept that everyone gets to choose their path, and that the path they choose has nothing to do with me, and it's not my responsibility to make any changes to their choice, I am heading in the right direction. Regardless of what path anyone else chooses, regardless of how that path has them showing up, and regardless of how their behaviors in that path impact my life and the life of those I love, all I ultimately have control over is how I respond to their behaviors. The law of love requires that I respond with love, not with resentment or revenge, not with anger or animosity. I like to think about how God responds to me when I behave out of line. He doesn't ask what I deserve. He asks what I need to progress, to move forward, to feel safe, to feel loved. God 100% honors my agency to behave how I want, and He has appropriate boundaries in place, consequences if you will. We don't get a free-for-all response from God, and neither do the people in our lives. 

22:29 

However, we get to learn how to respond with love, and with appropriate boundaries from a place of love, rather than a place  of anger or wanting to get even. We don't try to control their behavior with boundaries, but instead we let them know what behavior is okay and what behavior is not okay and then we lovingly follow through with the consequences set. This can be challenging for sure, but learning how to respond from a place of love always feels so much better. A real boundary is always going to be coming from a place of love. In fact, we set boundaries because of love. The better we love, the better our boundaries. 

23:15 

Okay, second thing that I like to do, I love asking myself the question, "how would love respond?" There are some tricky situations we find ourselves in, for sure, and when I can slow down, take a breath. personify love, and imagine how she would respond, what she would think or feel or do, now I'm making love a woman here, right, so just be aware of that, if I can imagine how she would respond, what she would think? What she would feel or do? It helps me clean up and clarify my own response. So first, patient love does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud, it does not dishonor others, it is not self seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth, it always protects, it always trusts, it always hopes, it always perseveres. 

24:21 

Now, that is a tall order to be sure and I just see like so many opportunities for me to learn how to love better in that list. But when we can learn to take a breath, to slow our response and think about how love would engage, we will be much more likely to be happy with our response. I love that the very next verse, verse 8 in 1 Corinthians, I think it's chapter 15 but I might be wrong...I love that the very next verse we are taught says that love never fails. It never fails because when we live the law of love, we are always in alignment with God and with our best selves and we open ourselves up to be able to feel God's love. 

25:16 

Alright, the third thing that I like to do...I work really hard to remember that regardless of how other people act, I get to choose how I act. I cannot control others, but I can learn to control myself. And this is the work of our lifetime, right? This is the place where I can feel empowered in my own life. When I try to control others, I always feel disempowered because I absolutely cannot control the behavior of anyone else. I can only control me. So stepping into that power, that control, and choosing to respond with love, especially in really difficult situations, always feels amazingly powerful. I love that Byron Katie says, "I love you and there's nothing you can do about it." I get to choose to love. No one can stop me, even the person who may resent my loving them. No one else gets to decide how I choose to think and feel. That is my agency. 

26:23 

And gosh darn it, love just feels so much better than anger or frustration or resentment. Love is the best feeling in the world. It feels so good. Why do we choose the opposite so often? When we really tap into love, that's what we want. For one, love feels incredibly powerful, not from a power over other people place, but an internal power that says, "I am strong." When I'm struggling to feel empowered in my life, it's most likely because I'm struggling to engage from a place of love, and instead I'm engaging from a place of fear. If you feel disempowered, check your love to fear ratio. When we are living our lives in alignment with God by living the law of love, we will feel closer to God and we will tap into our divinity and we will tap into our selves, our divine selves, the person we were created to be. Intentionally choosing love is powerful and it's liberating, and it's an incredible part of growing up. And I love growing up, don't you? Good stuff, the law of love. Let's take it a little bit more serious, shall we? God's really, really learned how to love. 

28:10 

Okay, if you would like some personal help with me, figuring this out or something else, this is what I do. I can help you. right? So you can go to tanyahale.com. You can sign up for a free consult. Let me tell you what that entails: I am doing 90 minute consults these days because I want to have an opportunity to coach you, to give you an experience of what coaching can do for you, how it can enlighten you and help you understand and see things that you don't see. Coaching is strong and powerful and I want you to have that experience. And then with that, you can have the information that you need to decide, "do I want to invest in having some one-on-one coaching?" One-on-one coaching is powerful. There's a reason I have my own coach because it is powerful. It helps me see, it helps me grow. Okay, if you want, you can listen to this podcast. You can learn stuff, but I promise you, you will make so much faster progress having a coach help you see and grow. 

29:22 

And here's the deal. So many of you are in tough, tough situations. You can spend the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years in this tough situation, being miserable, struggling, or you can get some help. You can figure this out and you can spend those next 20,  30, 40, 50 years feeling more empowered and feeling more in love with your life and with the people in your life than you ever have. I just cannot get over the difference this work makes in my life on a daily basis. It's powerful, amazing stuff. 

30:04 

Okay, one last thing. If you have not left me a review, will you please take two or three minutes to do that? It doesn't take a long time. If you have Apple, you can just pull up my podcast, scroll down to the bottom and it will have a place where you can give me some stars. Five stars would be fabulous. And you can write a quick review. And the reason that that is so important is the more five star reviews I get and the more reviews I get, the higher it bumps this up on the algorithm so that other people can find this podcast, so they can find this information. And I just want people to hear this. I want people to understand and feel empowered by the choices that we get to make to create the kind of relationships that we want. It's important to me and if you're here, I can dare say it's probably important to you as well. And that's a super easy, non intrusive way for you to share this information. So go to my podcast on Apple and you can do that. Okay, I guess that's gonna do it. Have a really, really great day. Have a great week and I will see you next time. Bye. 

31:16 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.