“One of the scribes came to Jesus and asked
him, ‘Which is the first of all the commandments?’ Jesus replied, ‘The first is
this: Hear O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord
your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and all
your strength. The second is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There
is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:28-31)
Love
your neighbor as yourself. This
has always been hard for me to grasp, not the part about loving your neighbor
but the part about loving them as you love yourself. For most of my life I did
not love myself. I didn’t think I was loveable in anyone’s eyes including myself
and God. So I’ve always prayed for God to help me love as he loves, to see
others with the love of Christ. This is where I draw my strength to love those
that I find difficult to love. But I have had to learn to love myself and
believe that I am loveable. I prayed for God to drive out of my heart those
demons that kept me in darkness and would continually pull me under when I was
beginning to be free of their lies.
I have a journal of my favorite
scripture passages and several of them remind me of God’s love for me that he
has had from the beginning. “Before I
formed you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I dedicated you…” (Jeremiah
1:5) “You formed my inmost being; you
knit me in my mother’s womb…my days were shaped, before one came to be.” (Psalm
139:13, 16) God is all-knowing, he knew everything about me, all my failures
and sins, even before I was in my mother’s womb and he has always loved me. For
the longest time I believed this about others but I didn’t believe it about
myself. But God has placed some amazing faith-filled people in my life that
have helped me to see that I am loveable. They have taught me scripture, the
very ones that I mentioned above and many more that reveal His love for each
and every one of us. Our bible is the living Word, God speaks to us through
this living Word. The words written in Jeremiah weren’t just written for him
but for each of God’s children. Christ’s resides in me, just as he does in each
one of us, and it is through this understanding that I have learned to love
myself and to love my neighbor as myself.
