When Wendy Ulrich was a practicing therapist, she learned that many of her clients struggled to know and recognize the love God had for them. The more she worked with clients, the more she realized that she too could work on knowing God’s love more.
“I had maybe one too many people tell me that they didn’t feel God's love for them personally,” said Ulrich, author of "Let God Love You: Why We Don’t, How We Can," (Deseret Book, $17.99). “They wished so much they could have that kind of personal experience that others talk about of feeling loved by God, and they didn’t understand why they just could never seem to have that experience.”
She began praying for an experience that would help her understand God’s love for her. After several months, Ulrich felt his love at an unexpected time.
“I was driving along in the car one day and reflecting on some things, and had this awareness — just powerful and strong feeling — of God's love for me,” Ulrich said in an interview with the Deseret News. “It kind of came out of nowhere, and I was very, very grateful for it.”
After working on what she could do to allow God’s love into her life, and stop blocking it from her heart, Ulrich combined her knowledge of God with her knowledge of psychology to write “Let God Love You: Why We Don’t, How We Can.”
Ulrich hopes that the personal spiritual experiences she shares in the book will help others to feel the empathy she has for those struggling with the subject.
“It’s easy to feel like nobody gets it, and to feel preached to when you’re in this boat without feeling understood,” Ulrich said. “One of the most difficult aspects for me personally was sharing some of the personal experiences that I’ve had on this subject. One in particular that I felt was almost too sacred for me to want to have that in a book and have in public, but I felt like it captured for me what the lesson has been, which is that God really wants to be close to us and sometimes — without even realizing it — we are the ones who keep him far away. “
“Let God Love You” shares tools to help readers see what they can do to trust God and open their heart to being loved. Ulrich points out that often the problem isn’t rooted towards God specifically, but it is rooted towards past experiences and relationships. Ulrich explores the topics of anxiety, depression, early upbringing, trauma and other psychological pieces in the book that shape our understanding of God.
“I do think there are blocks that we can clear,” Ulrich said. “That was part of my own block. … I realized I was holding up distance. There were things that I could work on. The impression that I got over the years was, this wasn’t just a problem I had with God. This was a problem I had with people, and I could work on it with people.”
In “Let God Love You” is a number of assessments and questionnaires readers can fill out to help better understand how they experience relationships. With understanding relationships with others, Ulrich points out that this can better relationships with God.
“I think we all believe at an intellectual level that God loves us,” Ulrich said. “I think many of us even assume in our hearts that that’s true but sometimes we have a difficult time really feeling his love for us.”
Ulrich hopes that readers will find healing from this book, better their relationship with God and others in their lives, and that it will help them tackle obstacles that may be intimidating to them.
“I’m hoping that people will get some pretty specific ways of doing self-examination and things that they can specifically … do to work on relationships, to open themselves up more to the intimacy of relationships, and to have a deeper level of compassion for themselves,” Ulrich said.