Highlight: Do you know their love language?
What are the primary love languages of the people closest to you? Knowing the love language of another person will help us understand how that person will best receive our love.
Paige Haley Drygas explains why this is so important.
“It puts the emphasis on the other person, not just ‘how do I feel?’ but, ‘how am I my making the other person feel?’ With a little bit of experimentation, you can see what makes that person feel loved and known.”
According to Dr. Gary Chapman, one of the top 5 love languages is Quality Time. Paige describes how to identify if one of your family members or friends has quality time as their primary love language.
“That would be the person who just really wants to be with you, nothing fancy where you don’t have to do anything spectacular, but just want to spend time together.”
In this day and age, finding quality time may be challenging because of our hectic schedules and constant distractions.
“You can be sitting next to someone and not actually give that person your time or paying attention to that person. For someone who craves time, the goal is to set aside all distractions and give the person that gift of time that will just make him or herself feel loved and known and appreciated.”
We need to be intentional about eliminating distractions to give our loved ones the gift of quality time. Paige says that this is especially true for parents whose child needs their undivided attention. She shares a personal example,
“I have two little boys and I realized that I was letting my phone distract me from my time with them. So even if I was sitting down, reading one of them a story, I would get notifications; something from Facebook, some great deal online that I just had to check out right then and there, etc. I would check my phone and ignore my boys for a minute and stop the book. I just felt such a conviction that I was not giving them my time and it was over something silly that really wasn’t that important to me.”
“For a lot of us, we really have to develop that self-discipline of just putting the phone down, and looking at the person and really seeing the person sitting across from us.”
Paige Haley Drygas has worked in book publishing since 1999. She was the General Editor of True Images: The Bible for Teen Girls and True Identity: The Bible for Women. She has partnered with authors Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Priscilla Shirer, and Tammy Maltby.
