“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The second is this: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Mark 12: 30-31a
It’s the part of the passage we too often gloss over
We speak to ourselves in negative ways. We tell ourselves we have failed. We aren’t smart. Others are better.
I remember in high school watching another girl assess herself in the girls’ room mirror. I thought she was beautiful. I wished I looked like her.
Then she stuck her tongue out at herself and walked out the door.
That stunned me. How could she think herself ugly? Then I realized. She is just like me. She thinks of herself the way I think of myself.
We were alike in our disdain for ourselves. Perhaps it has always been so. And perhaps more so among young women.
Yet today, it’s worse for young women who speak to themselves in that same negative voice as the girl in the mirror did.
As we did then, they compare themselves to airbrushed actresses, women on magazine covers, and other girls pondering their images in the mirror as their minds replay the negative echo of social media.
There is a solution. Loving our neighbor as we love ourselves requires us to love ourselves–to stop the negative talk–to affirm ourselves.
This affirmation is not an acquisition of pride–but of seeing ourselves as God sees us. We are people Christ came to die for. We are imago Dei–people of his image who walk in his way.
Imperfectly. Awkwardly. Stumbling at times.
But in the beauty of God’s love, we can see ourselves as the unique creations we are. The girl in the mirror is not ugly. She is specially designed for a purpose–an important purpose.
She is here to love herself because she is who he made her to be. And in loving herself–showing regard for herself–she affirms the God-reflection she finds others.
Love God. Love your neighbor. Love yourself.
And so fulfill all the commandments.
Photo Credit: Pixabay
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