God, love and actually saying it

As part of my sabbatical I'm sitting down with a counsellor to think through ministry and my calling as a pastor and who I am as a person. In our last meeting she asked me what God wanted from me and my go-to answer is obedience, faithfulness and dedication as a pastor. She kept pushing me until a light went off as I began to connect the dots between our conversation before and her question. The answer of course is that God wants my love. Kind of a duh moment for me, but I realised that I so often think about my relationship with God in terms of my calling as a pastor and not nearly enough in terms of my own personal relationship with God as a person, a child of his.
Do you remember in school when you would get the answer right and a warm glow of pride would go through you? That happened to me too :) I'm still kind of a kid at heart I guess. The problem was, my counsellor had another question waiting: sigh. This one got me too: how do you show God you love him? Again, my first thoughts revolve around doing, After all Paul tells us that love is an action word, something I keep reminding every couple who comes into my study wanting to get married. But somehow I knew that this wasn't the answer she was looking for. Finally the light bulb goes on again: I need to tell God I love him and it was then it struck me that I don't often stop and tell God, "I love you." I work at obedience, after-all Jesus said, "If you love me you will keep my commandments." I work at faithfulness, working at being the pastor and person God wants me to be, but I don't often say, "God, I love you."
It makes sense, at least to me, that I need to say these three words regularly. Yes, love is an action word and it shows in how I live, but when I fail to tell me wife, "I love you," on a regular basis, she starts to wonder what is wrong in our relationship. Being a guy, a Dutch guy, saying "I love you" doesn't seem to come so naturally to me, but my wife has taught me how important and powerful these three words are. When I talked to God later that afternoon, I said to him, "God, I love you, I know you know this, but my saying it reminds me of its truth." And that's kind of the point here, by saying those three words and hearing them come out of our mouths, we remind ourselves of the foundation of our relationship with God; he loved us first and desires our love in return. I encourage you the next time you take time to talk to God, begin with these words, "Hello God, I want you to know I love you." It will make you prayer time even more meaningful and special.