Taking Time to Love

I love my family! The best part of everyday is waking up to our sweet little girl talking and laughing to herself.  I love listening to that little voice! She is a great joy and blessing to us.  I've been thinking about love languages. I recently read the book "The 5 love languages," by Gary Chapman.  He shares each love language in detail about what is needed for a person with each specific love language to feel loved. The 5 languages are Physical Touch, Quality Time, Receiving Gifts, Acts of Service and Words of Affirmation.   For example, my love language is Quality Time.  For me to really feel loved having someone take the time to listen to me and to talk to me without distraction of a cell phone, T.V., computer, or even just things in daily life really makes me feel like someone cares.  But really taking the time to the listen and to understand how I'm feeling is really important to me.

I've been thinking about my days growing up and there were times where I don't think I received that quality time that I needed. Even today when I visit family, there are times where I really just need someone to listen to me and it's hard when I don't receive that time. But I've been thinking about my sweet little girl Emree.  There are things I wished I had with my family that I want her to have.  My goal is to be open minded and to recognize her love language and to strengthen her.  I want to make sure that I take the time to listen to my daughter without jumping to conclusions and make sure that she is feeling loved in the way that she needs to feel loved.  I want to be able to have a special relationship with her and I think I can do that as long as I pay attention to her and love her in her own way.  Right now, as a little child, Emree really needs physical touch and time together to know that she is loved and as she grows she may need something different and I hope that I can recognize these changes as life goes on.Even though we may have our own specific love languages, we still need elements of each language.

It's kind of cool to recognize other peoples love languages.  You can usually tell what a person's love language is by how they treat others.  We tend to show others love in the way that we want to be loved.  Travis and I have been watching our families to see what their languages are.  It's kind of fun, because once you notice the language of others you can start loving them in that way and you can see a difference right away in the way they act.Sometimes we can get so caught up in ourselves that we forget to open our eyes to those around us. It's almost like Heavenly Father placed these qualities within us so that we can draw closer to each other. We just have to take the time to notice what it means to really love one another.  When we take the time to love we are drawing closer to him.