Love Your Neighbor as YOURSELF

Oh the two great commandments. We are taught them as children and while they are always remembered, they slowly fade into the background of our lives. In the second: Love your neighbor as yourself, I believe we have often lost an essential focus: the YOURSELF. How can we love our neighbor if we do not know how to love ourselves? Media usually reinforces a belief that we are not good enough: we are too fat, too thin, not muscular enough, not healthy enough, not good enough in bed, our faces are not good enough unless we buy this or that product, the glory of age; which is admired in some cultures, is deemed undesirable, and the list goes on and on. Sadly, some churches also reinforce the belief that we are not good enough. We do not depend enough on God. We are still too sinful. We need to do more good works. I believe there is too much focus on what is BAD in us that we are unable to accept and revel in the GOOD in us. We are called to love and accept God and each other, but how can we if we cannot love and accept ourselves? There is indeed value in learning who we are, who God made us to be, and how to love ourselves. We often look for others to love us because we cannot ourselves. We look for self-love in our families, in our relationships, in our churches, in our communities, but we are usually disappointed. We do not feel loved enough, and I think this may be because we have not learned to love ourselves. We therefore find ourselves unable to love those around us very well because our cup is always empty and if we always expect our cups to be filled by love from others...how can we fill other's love cups? Let's take a few moments every now and then and revel in our goodness, in our uniqueness, in our identity, and in our essence. Let's remind ourselves who it is that God created and how we are essential to God, the universe, and how we have so much to offer the world. Let us look in the mirror and think: 'Wow, I am beautiful: every single curve, wrinkle, freckle, and scar.' Let's enjoy and enhance our strengths, so we can balance our incessant working on our weaknesses. Let's become reacquainted with ourselves, positively, so we can learn to love ourselves again. When we do this, we can constantly live in the full circle of loving our neighbor as well as ourselves.