Keeping healthy, loving, and caring relationships throughout your life is challenging, time consuming, and often difficult to keep up with. These relationships require extra effort and extra determination to keep them working smoothly and moving forward in the right direction.

When people commit themselves to these types of realtionships, it usually becomes one of their main focuses in life, which can be a beautiful, but also dangerous thing.

Love is a beautiful thing, and I really believe that there is nothing more beautiful in life than to love someone, and be loved back by them. But, people lose sight of the fact that in addition to that, there is TRULY nothing more beautiful in life than to loved by Him, because there is no other love as deep or as strong that exists.

As people form serious relationships in their personal lives, get wrapped up in time consuming activities, and academic responsibilities, teenagers and young adults often push their spiritual lives aside. This side of life always seems like the first side to go when people get too busy, and I’ve just recently realized why that is.

We take advantage of our relationship with God.

Since we know He will always be there, that He will always offer us forgiveness, and that He will always love us, we find it easier to throw this relationship to the side every once in a while, or not offer Him as much attention as we are offering others. We get into a routine of not praying as often, not attending church services as consistently, yet it doesn’t hit our internal conscious as hard because we know He is always understanding and forever compassionate.

This is the complete wrong way to go about maintaining a healthy relationship with God. Having a relationship with Him is just like any other relationship you have in your personal life, and if you are spending time and love with those people, you should definitely be able to spend time and love with God. You have to work at it, every day, and you have to be able to open up to Him, ask Him for help, show Him a side of you that not everyone sees, just like you have to do in your own personal relationships.

You have to put in the effort.

A relationship with God is one of the only relationships you will have consistently throughout your lifetime. Throughout your time here of this earth, He is the one you can always count on from the day you are born, until the day you pass. You can’t say that about hardly anyone else in your life, so you must always hold that in high regard.

Yes, God will always be there to celebrate your triumphs with you, and help you get back up again when you fall, but He deserves more recognition and more love from us then we will ever be able to give back to Him. But, let's at least try,

Let's at least try to put in that extra time to make your relationship as good as it can possibly be, let's at least try to put in the extra time to say thank you to Him more than we usually do. Because one thing about God is that He is not selfish like us humans, He is not looking for something in return or looking for justification on all the great work He’s doing, He just simply wants to know you and wants to be apart of your life.

Let Him in, and let Him show you what a true loving and caring relationship can look like, because with God you can go anywhere, do anything, but without Him you are only blinded to all the amazing opportunities He creates for us each and every day.

He is worth the extra time.