Love our Neighbor

Dear Family,

    This week’s message is one that I am passionate about.  It is about love.  Before we can truly love others, we have to develop love and respect for ourselves.  Then we can extend that love to others.  I challenge you to reach out to someone you may be struggling to love right now, even if you find that this someone is you. 

With Love,

DaD

Loving Our Neighbor in a Shrinking World

Our world seems to get smaller every day. Travel and communications are shrinking the distances between us. Multinational business are bridging boundaries, and ecological systems are intertwining and affecting one another.

As people are drawn closer together, we have a greater and greater effect on each other. John Donne wrote three and a half centuries ago, "No man is an island. . . ; every man is a piece of the continent." 1

We are neighbors on this steadily shrinking continent called earth, and we will all be happier as we learn to care for and cooperate with each other. Jesus said we should love our neighbor as ourselves. We may think that loving ourselves is easy. But, in fact, most disrespect for others springs from a lack of self-respect. When we feel inadequate and unworthy, we may downgrade others to try to make ourselves look better. Families, cultures, and nations can fall into this unloving relationship. History is filled with border disputes, feuds, war, and bloodshed arising from self-hatred transferred to our neighbors.

Each of us is a child of God. We are worthy and capable of receiving and giving love. As we accept this fact and humbly love ourselves, we are freed of the need to denigrate others.

Our next step on the road to loving others will probably be to love those who are like us. It is relatively easy to love people who share our opinions, lifestyles, and tastes. There is nothing wrong with loving those who are similar to us, but restricting our love to only this inner circle is very confining. We exclude the vast majority of the human race who are different from ourselves.

The next phase, then, is to learn to love others despite our differences. When we reach this point, we may feel we have arrived, but there is one more step in this journey. That is when we love others, not in spite of their differences but because of their differences. We do not ask or expect that others change to become more lovable to us. We love them as they are. This ultimate view of human relationships was described by Jesus when He said, "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." 2

To reach out to those who differ from us, despise us, hate and harm us—this is the mark of true maturity as a human being. It is not easy. But it can be done. Someone must break the cycle of mutual recrimination that exists when we love only our own and hate those outside our circle.

Let us pray to God to give us courage to reach beyond our comfortable associates; wisdom to understand and appreciate the good in every person; and the strength to love even those who hate us. As we do, the binding together that is coming with our shrinking world will become, in fact, a bonding of human hearts into a better world.

^1. In John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, edited by Emily Morison Beck (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1980), p. 254.

^2. Matthew 5:44.

"May Peace Be With You"  Music and the Spoken Word