Love Yourself First

"Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD." Leviticus 19:18

"The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'There is no commandment greater than these." Mark 12:31

I've mentioned verses like this a lot here on my blog. Loving my neighbor seems to be an ongoing battle, and every time I think I'm doing okay, a new challenge comes along. But what I sometimes fail to remember is that there is a second part to this verse. Not only does it say to love your neighbor, it says love your neighbor AS yourself. We need to love our neighbors, but we also need to love ourselves, and in the context I'm reading these verses... we need to love ourselves first, before we can give that love away to others.

Love ourselves? What on earth does that mean? What does it mean to love myself? To me it means I can be happy with myself just the way I am. I don't have low self-esteem because I stopped criticizing myself long ago. I stopped looking at myself with a critical eye. So instead of seeing all the flaws and faults I just see myself. We can learn from that. When we look at other people those flaws and faults often jump out at us first. We can learn to stop looking for those, to stop being critical of everyone we come across and instead see the beautiful person inside of them.

It also means to some extent that physically we do our best to take care of our bodies. We try to eat right, and sometimes that simply means the actual act of eating. Skipping meals or eating cake instead of breakfast is not taking care of one's body. We need to love our bodies and want to take care of them! I certainly don't mean suddenly going on a diet or giving up sweets, I simply mean making wise choices. We also don't become gluttonous, inhaling every morsel of food we see, we show restraint, because we love ourselves and we want to be around when our children are having children. We exercise as we need to, giving our body some necessary growth and energy to be ready for the next task in front of us.

Loving yourself can certainly be harder than even loving your worst enemy. It's been said that "we are our own worst enemy." Yet it needs to come first. We can't learn to love the world around us if we can't love ourselves first.