The scripture says to love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:39). I have had people tell me since I don't love myself than I don't have to love my neighbor (I have felt like that before myself). I think the key to this verse is that we are supposed to love ourselves. Not in a way that we think we are better than everyone else but love ourselves in a humble way, just knowing we are a special, valuable person that God loves and so do others. But what has happened in some of our lives as children we are given wrong information. For example we might have been told on a regular base that we are a worthless person and we should have never been born or that nobody wants us and no one could love someone like us. All of that is wrong information. I guess the reason people say things like that is because they might not feel that any one loves them, so it becomes a pattern of passing on awful, horrible, wrong concepts of who we really are. With all of this wrong information about ourselves we can and many times become very bitter angry people. When that happens we lash out at others like it is there fault we feel like we do. Truth be known they never said any of those things, maybe we thought they looked at us strange, or we thought they was laughing at us just because we saw them laughing. Then all the things we were told as a child comes racing back into our minds, even if we don't realize it, and we amuse the worse. So the self-hate keeps growing, so to say love your neighbor as yourself, might be saying to us treat them however we want because it doesn't matter, in which case your neighbor never had a chance. But really what we need to do is change the way we think about ourselves. We need to start reprograming our brain. We need to tell ourselves that we are valuable, we are important, we are special, and really believing it. It will take time to reprogram our brain but remember what was said to us didn't happen one time we heard it many times. Therefore, it stands to reason that it would take many times to correct the wrong information we have been given. When we really learn that we are valuable and that God made us special and there is something great for us to do then it to love our neighbor will not be such a hard thing. So my challenge to all of us today is to start telling ourselves these things: I love myself because, I AM VALUABLE, I AM IMPORTANT, I AM SPECIAL, I AM MADE FOR GREATNESS. Have a great day loving who you really are, then begin loving your neighbor as yourself.
