Does being loved mean being made much of?

I'm reading a book by John Piper called Don't Waste Your Life. The point of the book is to let people know:

"The wasted life is the life without a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples."

I came to Christ in an abandoned army camp in the Swiss Alps. I prayed the prayer of salvation on a balcany overlooking a prodigious peak so tall I couldn't see the tops for the clouds. I had the privilge of going back to that very spot my feshman year of college. My then boyfriend (now husband) took a photo of the peat from that exact place. That photo is a precious thing to me.

Today I read this aresting passage from Don't Waste Your Life:

"We waste our life when we do not pray and think and dream and plan toward magnifying God in all spheres of life. God created us for this: to live our lives in a way that makes him look more like the greatness and the beauty...that he really is. ... For many people, this is not obviously an act of love. They do not fee loved when they are told that God created them for his glory. They feel used. This is understandable given the way love has been almost completely distorted in our world. For most poeple, to be loved is to be made much of. Almost everything in our Western culture serves this distorition of love. We are taught in a thousand ways that love means increasing someone's self-esteem. Love is helping someone feel good about themselves. Love is giving someone a mirror and helping them like what he sees.

"That is not what the Bible means by the love of God. Love is doing what is best for someone. But making self the object of our highest affections is not best for us. It is, in fact, a lethal distraction. We were made to see and savor God...to be supremely satisfied, and thus spread in all the world the worth of his presence. Not to show people the all-satisfying God is not to love them. To make them feel good about themselves when they were made to feel good about seeing God is like taking someone to the alps and locking them in a room full of mirrors."

Having seen the Alps, this was particularly affecting. Seeing the mountians and seeing God happend almost simultaneously for me. Now that I've experienced both, I can't imagine the people I was with in Switzerland withholding either from me. Most of us who have experience the Alps would definitely encourage others hadn't to get out of the bathroom and onto the balcony. But Christians - are we that excited to encourage them to turn from finding satisfaction in self to finding it in God?

We should be.