People Need Love

People have needs. People need air, food, and water to survive, and they need adequate clothing, shelter, and safety to help them stay alive. But according to a psychologist named Abraham Maslow, once those needs have been met, the most important human need is love. People need love. And perhaps more importantly, they need to feel loved. And once their other needs are met, they are going to seek love, or substitutes for love, wherever they can get it.

Ideally, people would receive and feel love from their own families. That is part of the reason why God created families in the first place, to create a space where we, from infancy, can learn to feel, recognize, and express love.

People can also, hopefully, receive and feel love from God and members of His church. God's love, though sometimes disguised as trials and/or natural phenomena, is all around us, and God teaches His children to love everyone as well.

Between God and families, people should feel showered with an abundance of love.

But sometimes they don't. Sometimes people's families aren't as loving as they could be. Sometimes, God seems distant or nonexistent. Sometimes, people have a hard time recognizing the love that God and their families have for them. At those times, people often feel impelled to seek for love elsewhere.

Sometimes they find love in friendships and communities. Sometimes they form "found families" with close friends and/or people like them. Sometimes, when they don't feel love from family, God, or even friends or communities, they'll look for love in less-likely places. A person who feels desperately short on love may end up searching for any poor imitation of love wherever they can find it.

The sad part is that the ideal source of love is also the default source of love, and people generally only look for love in worse places when they feel that all of the better sources have failed them. By divine design, people are usually born into families, born to two parents who love each other and their children. Ideally, these parents also love God and teach their children how much God loves them. 

Sadly, this doesn't always happen, but we can do our best to make sure it happens in our own families. We can make sure our family members know we love them by expressing love for them in every way we can. We can talk to them, listen to them, care about their problems, offer comfort and (when appropriate) advice. We can give each other gifts and hugs and words of encouragement. We can apologize, and we can forgive. There are many ways to show love for each other, and the most important way to show love is in whatever way our loved ones need.

Similarly, we can try to recognize and share evidence of God's love for all His children.

This is important, because people need love. People need to both be and feel loved. And if the people we love don't feel the love we have for them, they will look for love elsewhere. If that happens, then, whether they ultimately find love or not, they won't have gotten it from us.