Neighbors

My mom and I were recently talking and I was (a little pridefully, if I am honest) correcting her misquoting of a verse: Matthew 22:39.  Mom had believed it said "Love your neighbor as I (being God/Jesus) have loved you." I corrected her with the actual scripture which is "Love your neighbor as you love yourself."  The next day while driving to work, I was going over the conversation in my head. I was thinking about how cool I was to be able to correct scripture to my mom of all people! Then it hit me. My mom was not so off base.  Her thought process actually made more sense then what the actual verse read as.

Why wouldn't Jesus have commanded us to love our neighbors as He has loved us? Isn't that the greatest love you can have?

Mulling over this question, I started to think about how people treat each other. I thought about how people who treat others like crap usually feel about themselves. Bingo! That is our problem: we do not understand how much God loves us, how much He wants for us to love and value ourselves, so we cannot love our neighbors the way God has called us. This realization brought so many thoughts over me. We are all doing the best we can to love on each other, but it is so hard to do when we cannot find the love within ourselves to put out. We are a broken people who insist on carrying burdens too big for us. This is why we need to lean on God.

As I recall, Jesus was not a doormat.  He rested when He needed, He prayed when He needed and He served when God told him. Jesus knew He was no good to anyone else if He did not know His limits, His value and His abilities through God.  By loving ourselves how God loves us, we will in turn love our neighbor as we love ourselves, which is loving each other how God loves us. What a beautiful thing.