CHAPTER 12
Love You
For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.
—Matthew 12:34
When people and preachers are trying to teach us how to treat other people, whether in word or action, there are some verses that always get tossed into the mix. And they are verses I like. Seriously. But I wonder how well we really know them. They have stung me a time or two, when I realized what they were really asking of me. It’s not just about other people. It’s about me, too.
Matthew 22: 34–40
Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
In high school, my mind was full of evil whispers of how unlovely I was, how much I needed to change, and how God had messed up when He made me. I didn’t know then that I could call those whispers “lies,” so I let them fester and grow until they were kudzu covering my soul. And I lived like that, in self-hatred, for years.
Why didn’t I just talk about it? It’s a question I’ve rolled around in my mind for years. In the end, I think the truth is that I didn’t reveal the things in my head because I didn’t know that I had a choice to think of them as anything but truth. It wasn’t until later that I learned to distinguish lies from truth and believe the labels God puts on me. My teen years were the classic story of someone eating a mud pie because they didn’t realize they were sitting in the yard of a bakery.
(Dessert talk is so distracting. Back to high school stories.)
Once during my sophomore year, my mom was taking me home from soccer practice and asked me a pointed question: “How do you think you can love your friends if you don’t love yourself?”
I was puzzled. “Who cares if I love me?” I thought. I remember genuinely considering that my mother did not know what she was talking about.1
(Shocking no mom ever, a teenager thought she knew best.)
She didn’t push me, she just let me mull her question over in my mind. I don’t know that I even answered her; if I did, it was something teen-angsty like, “Uh, Mom, you don’t even understand how much I love my friends and I love God and that’s all that matters.” And then I probably got out of the minivan and took my sweaty soccer self and sat on her beautiful couch, waiting for her to cook dinner for our family. (So what I’m saying is, I was a real pleasure as a teen.)
That conversation has stuck with me for all these years. And as I grew up, and God rescued me from many of those lies and taught me how to fight for truth, I realized (gasp) that my mother was right.
While we are capable of loving others to some degree even when we are drowning in self-hate, there is a freedom in love that comes with following the second-greatest commandment.
Do you love yourself? Do you see yourself the way God sees you? Do you recognize how absolutely loveable you are? Because when you do, when you see all that truth, you can’t help loving your neighbor.
To love someone is to believe in them. When someone believes in you, it changes everything—how you carry yourself, how you treat others, how you live day after day. You can give that same gift to those around you.
Feel the Love
This section gets real personal and all up in my business. I bet it feels the same for you. Sure, it’s hard to talk about the mean girl and how to spend time listening to God, but things seem to get more raw and intense when we are talking about those quiet moments of self-dislike.
But here’s the thing. Those verses at the beginning of the chapter? THAT. IS. TRUE. My mom was right: you have to love yourself to love others well. Jesus said it Himself—love others AS you love yourself. That’s something worth thinking through.
I would never claim to have every answer to every question, but when it comes to moving from self-hatred to a true appreciation of how God has made me, I’m a bit of a seasoned expert. Trust me, I’ve looped through that cycle more times than I can count, including this morning when I did not like the look of the jeans I put on and told myself so. Old Annie would have continued a barrage of ugly remarks about my looks, but instead I looked in the mirror and said, “Hey, put on a different pair. No biggie.” And I shook it off and moved on.
(Listen, I know I talk out loud to myself a lot. But you know what? When it is the difference between living under the weight of those slimy lies or living in the light freedom of truth, I’ll talk to myself for that. You would too.)
I’d like to insert a caveat here: you can only love because Christ loved you first.
1 John 4:19
We love because he first loved us.
See, it’s not that you are intrinsically good and deserve to be loved—remember that at our core, we are all sinners in need of a Savior. It’s not that you have earned the love of God or that you deserve to love yourself because you are so perfect at being a person.
Quite the opposite.
God loves us, even when we don’t deserve it.
1 John 4:10
This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
So the caveat is this—you haven’t earned this love, it’s a gift. We don’t attempt to beat the lies and believe the truth and love ourselves because we are perfect. We do it because in our imperfections, God loves us deeply and has made us just the way He wanted.
One of my favorite vloggers (yes, I have favorite vloggers—don’t you?) is Hank Green. One time, Hank said, “We are all differently broken, semi-functional, rusted-out love machines.” And I think that’s right.
Speaking love is about you too. It’s not just outward; it’s inward. It’s realizing that we are broken and rusted out and yet still loved and able to love.
So I humbly present these thoughts on loving yourself, knowing that this topic is sensitive and slow and broad and possibly painful. You may have a billion other ideas on what it looks like to really love you. That’s great—go for it. I’m just sharing the ones I know have worked for me.
1. Speak kindly to yourself.
Even on the hard days, that’s the first step. Use your words to speak life. Remember how Proverbs 18:21 says everything you say is either producing life or death? It’s just as true when you talk to yourself. Just like with my jeans this morning, I have to choose words of life over words of death.
Quit being a mean girl to yourself. Seriously. If we are out to end that pandemic, it has to start here. Inside. At the core of you. If you are going to be the girl who speaks life and develops beautiful things in others with her words, it begins with doing that for yourself to yourself.
Simply said, if we aren’t going to stand any longer for the mean girl to exist in our schools and churches and teams and neighborhoods, we can’t let her exist in our heads either.
Self-talk is a big part of everyone’s life. We constantly, and subconsciously, have thoughts running through our minds that direct our days. You need to listen to those. The negative ones? The ones that cut you down and make you feel unloved? Time to chuck them. Stop yourself, identify the lie, and say the truth in its place.
2. Speak kindly about yourself to others.
While you shouldn’t be that girl who talks about herself all the time, you also don’t want to be that girl who says, “Uh, well, that dress looks amazing on you but would look disgusting on me.” There’s no need to tear yourself down. You would never say (I hope), “Uh, that dress looks AMAZING on ME but would look DISGUSTING on YOU.” You wouldn’t say anything like that to someone else. So why would you say that to yourself?
And this is a great thing to hold your friends accountable to as well—just like my friend Nichole does to me when she tells me, “Don’t talk about my friend that way.” Accountability doesn’t always feel good, but when done in love, calling your friends out of lies and into truth is the kindest thing you can do.
I think this also should affect the lyrics we sing. When you sing, you are proclaiming things about yourself or someone else. That’s why worship music is so powerful—you are focusing on truths about God, words set to music, out loud. For example, I like to listen to Meredith Andrews’s album Worth It All. Every song on there will challenge how you live. “Start With Me” says:
You’re still the God of the empty tomb
The One who came to life again
So come alive in me.
Those are some serious words. Then she sings,
My life is an empty cup, fill it up.
I wanna hear every rescued heart cry, “You’re enough
You’re enough”
Break what needs breaking
‘til You’re all we see
Start with me. Start with me.
I mean, y’all. If we sing those words out loud about ourselves, God will change our lives.
On the other hand, so many songs we sing have deadly lyrics. I think of one pop song that says, “I’m a hazard to myself, don’t let me get me …” And so on. Why are you singing THAT stuff over your life? No good, amiga.
I’m not going to sit here and tell you to delete all the music you listen to that isn’t worship music. I’m not that girl. But I will tell you that if you are trying to love yourself well and stand guard over the words you say, the songs you sing are a part of that too.
3. Believe the Truth.
Do I need to go there again? Read the last chapter. Again. Until something sinks past the insecurities and lies and settles into the bottom of your knower and plants itself there.
EVERYTHING changes when you believe truth. Everything.
4. Walk with confidence.
Strut, sister. Really. You are so loved. You are God’s priority. You have nothing to fear or feel insecure about.
I know, I know. Easy to say, harder to do when you are being picked on or not picked at all. But that’s the truth you have to let seep into every area of you. Trust me, I still feel left out and overlooked and unloved some days. We all do. But deep in me, the truth lives and breathes and speaks louder.
So I stand tall. I mean, as tall as a 5’6” girl can stand. But I do. Whether I’m married or single or size 0 or size 22 or have too much hair or cut my bangs too short, I am loved. I am treasured. I am confident.
Psalm 27:1–3
The Lord is my light and my salvation—whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life—of whom shall I be afraid?
When evil men advance against me to devour my flesh, when my enemies and my foes attack me, they will stumble and fall.
Though an army besiege me, my heart will not fear; though war break out against me, even then will I be confident.
Even then. Be confident.
5. Take care of yourself.
This looks different for everyone. And I am certainly not telling you to eat a certain way or be a certain size or wear a certain brand or go to a certain college (though I am deeply partial to the SEC, particularly my alma mater the University of Georgia). You know your body and what your body needs, and you need to care of it. If you love you, then you should love this shell that God has made to house your beautiful soul.
I love getting my eyebrows waxed. I haven’t always. In fact, it wasn’t until college that I realized I didn’t want to have bushy eyebrows or, ahem, a mustache. (Don’t judge me—I’m just being honest with you.) So as I grew to love me, I began to take better care of myself, which for me involves waxing areas that I don’t want to be hairy. (I never thought writing the word hairy in my book would make me feel squeamish, but it does. Sorry if it makes you feel the same.)
On the other hand? The more I grew to love me the less I dyed my hair. For most of high school, all of college, and a few years after, I colored my hair every shade under the sun and some straight from the sun. I liked it, and it made me feel pretty to be a blonde. Or a redhead. But for the last handful of years, I’ve felt in my heart that for me, to truly love me, I wanted my natural hair color back.
Does that mean you have to wax your eyebrows and stop dying your hair? Absolutely not. You can dye your hair like a rainbow and have the most beautiful unibrow in the world. I totally don’t care. But YOU need to decide what things make you feel pretty and loved.
There’s a saying that my stylist friend Amber reminds me of often—”look good, feel good.” I don’t want it to be true; I wait around a lot trying to feel good about me and then hope that translates into looking good. But many professionals say it is the other way around.
Within the last year, loving myself the way God loves me has taken an entirely new turn. I have a disease (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome) that can be controlled and helped greatly by eating a healthy diet. I’ve known for years—I mean, like EIGHT years—that I had this disease, but I hate dieting so much that I have always ignored it, even though this disease is pretty serious and can lead to really serious issues in the future.
(By the way, you should hate dieting too. The diet industry is the worst. Check the appendix for some resources if you want to read more about the freedom to eat healthy without being in bondage to dieting.)
And then, one Saturday in January, I sat at brunch in front of a pile of bananas foster pancakes with some of my best gals. Kelley began to talk about her chronic illness and the way that eating healthily had healed her body.
It was like my eyes were opened for the first time.
I have a disease. I can control that disease. And yet I choose not to because … what? Because I’m lazy and don’t want to miss out on pancakes?
But God spoke loudly to my heart that day through Kelley. I realized that loving me required treating my body the way it needs to be treated, even if that means missing out on some things. Like pancakes. Sigh.
At the suggestion of my doctor, I am now dairy free. Yes, I miss cheese like I would miss Twitter if it went away (meaning A LOT), but I know what love looks like here. And this is the right thing to do.
And you know what? I feel better than I’ve felt in years. My outsides and my insides continue to heal and I know that the next step of loving me was treating my body well.
It’s not about following rules—you don’t have to be like me. It’s about hearing God on what loving you looks like. Whether it is saving your babysitting money to buy a nice pair of boots or going to a Zumba class or having a friend teach you how to curl your hair, there are things you can do to show love to yourself.
You only get one body, friend. Love it. Treat it well. Don’t harm it with cuts or bruises, don’t destroy it with drugs and alcohol, don’t give it away to get love, don’t abuse it with gluttonous eating. Instead, embrace it, find what makes you feel good about you, and go for it! (Remember: Confidence. Look good, feel good.)
6. Do the things you like.
At a retreat a few weeks ago, I did a Q&A that ended with a student asking me what is the one thing I wish I would have known as a ninth grader. That’s one of the easiest questions I’ve ever answered.
I wish I would have known that I could like anything I wanted to like.
I loved playing in the middle school band. I’ve always been a huge music fan. In fact, I taught myself to play the piano by using a tiny three-octave electric keyboard and a hymnal that my choir director gave us at the end of the school year in third grade. So when I entered middle school, I immediately joined the band. It was a tough choice between band and orchestra, because I couldn’t decide between the French horn and the cello. While my friend and neighbor Grace joined the orchestra, I felt the pull to the French horn. And boy, did I love that thing.
When it was time to go to high school, though, I quit because I thought it was uncool to be in the band. My self-esteem was so low that I gave up something I really enjoyed because I was working so hard to be perceived as cool.
If I had really loved me then, I would have kept playing the French horn and probably would have really enjoyed it. Maybe I’d be performing in the Nashville Symphony now instead of just wondering if I even remember how to play the instrument. But I thought it was more important to do the “cool thing” than to do the thing I loved—I needed everyone else’s approval since I didn’t have my own.
But listen. To truly love yourself gives you permission to do the thing you want to do, to like whatever you want to like.
Remember my friend Anne from the chapter about our online life? The one who made friends through tumblr? Anne gets this. She is into the stuff she is into because she genuinely likes it, not because someone else decided it was cool. And I think that’s awesome.
That’s my hope for you. That as you grow to love you more and more, you will feel freedom to love the things you love instead of altering what you do because you think that’s what it will take to be accepted.
You. Are. Accepted. By God. And hopefully, you accept you too.
Love to read? Read.
Love to sew? Sew.
Love to make music or cakes or crafts? Make.
Remember that God created you on purpose; you are a unique recipe that does not exist anywhere else on this planet. So the things you love and the combination of your skills and desires are unlike anyone else’s. And that’s amazing.
When you are living out the things you love, your words follow suit. And here’s a verse so you remember:
Matthew 12:34
For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.
I love what The Message says here too:
It’s your heart, not the dictionary, that gives meaning to your words.
Right? Right.
I am the happiest Annie I have ever been, I think. At thirty-three, I am still single and still renting a home and still cannot curl my hair the way I wish I could. But I’m telling you, as I grow in loving me and understanding God’s love for me, I am free to do the things that I really love to do—like puzzles, going to baseball games, watching The Waltons, writing books about things I’m still learning, and wearing my huge slippers even when my intern makes fun of me (lay off, Connor, these are cool). You don’t have to think I’m cool, because in my heart I know how God feels about me, and I am FREEEEEEEEE to be me. (Sing it, Francesca Battistelli.)
Does that mean life is perfect? No! The tops of my white sheets are stained with mascara from crying myself to sleep a few nights ago, and I still struggle with sin and life and hurt and all the rest of it.
But in my core, things are calm. Though the storms of this life swirl around me and splash me and bruise me, my inside is calm. I am loved. I know it. And I live out of that—the writing, the speaking, the friendships, the mentor moments, all of it—starting in that deep place of knowing I am loved and learning more and more every day to love myself too.
I’m praying the same for you.
And then? Then our words can change things. Then our words, dripping with love and laced with grace, will fight against the lies and invite the Truth into every situation. And you will be known by your love.
Your Words Matter
Memorize the Word
For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.
—Matthew 12:34
Read the Word
• Matthew 22:30–40
• Proverbs 18:21 (Methinks you should have this memorized by now. 
)
• 1 John 4:19
• 1 John 4:10
• Psalm 27:1–3
Journal Your Words
• Write the memory verse in your journal.
• Do you struggle with loving yourself? When did it start?
• What do you need God to say to you to help heal your heart toward yourself?
• What are some steps you can take to start loving yourself better?
• Can you list a few people (one to three) whom you could talk to about this? I know having Nichole in my life and in this conversation has helped a ton.
Use Your Words
• Do something for yourself today. Maybe buy a new bottle of nail polish (may I suggest a dark yet friendly purple, like our couch on the book cover?) or go on a jog while listening to your favorite album or paint something new. Just do something that reminds you that you are loved and lovely.
• Write a letter to yourself. (I know, it sounds nutso. But hear me out.) Just sit down with a piece of paper and an envelope and write yourself a note about how you WANT your life to be. What would it look like if you really loved yourself? How would your life be different if you knew how God felt about you, believed it, and lived like it? Take some time to write a letter to yourself, like you would to a friend, encouraging her to live that way. Share verses and thoughts and encourage her (being yourself) to learn to love herself.
• Mail it. Seriously. Mail it. Put that puppy in an envelope, put a stamp on it, and ask your mom to stick it in the mail in two weeks or two days, or hand it to your best friend and ask her to mail it over the weekend.
• Read it. Believe it. LOVE YOU.