What do you think when you read this button? Would you wear it around for a day? Would it be true if you did? Do you? Do you love yourself?
This stuff makes my palms sweaty. You see, I was brought up in a religion that spent 90% of the time beating selfishness and desire and will and self-love out of me. There was no spark of goodness, only a predisposition for wickedness. “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it.” I was led to believe that I could never trust my heart because it is “deceitful above all things and desparately wicked.” Little songs taught me that the only way to joy was to put myself last. “He must increase, I must decrease.” Down, push yourself down. I grew up under a bombardment of feelings of guilt-induced worthlessness. Get up earlier, pray longer, read more, learn more, tell more people. I was led to believe that I wasn’t good enough and I never would be…until I finally made it to Heaven, where finally all of this crap that is me will be done away with and I’ll be safe from myself. Self-love is pride and vanity, the personification of the Devil himself. “I will be like the Most High.”
Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” I think for many years I did. I was full of judgment, mis-trust and disdain for me. That’s how I loved others.
Could it be that, in order to love others as the Father intends, we have to first be ok with ourselves? I have to love me. Not in a way that excuses my shortcomings, but in a way that speaks truth to myself. Repentance has been turned into shaming control by religion, when the reality is that it’s simply a beautiful admittance of the truth. And truth is freedom. I’m broken, that’s the truth. No need to deny it or hate myself because of it. If the Father asks us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves I think we’re left to asssume that He loves us the way that He loves Himself. If He thinks of me that way, who am I to think less of me? This is not a release to embrace my depravity. It’s a call to open and honest repentance.
When we struggle to love someone perhaps the best place to start is by discovering what we’re not ok with inside ourselves. One of the best things someone ever asked me to believe was that I’m worth it. That has produced an increased capacity to love others. It makes it easier to tend to others needs because I’m not cowering behind my lack of trust in me and fear that I may make a mistake. It leaves me not so fragile and frail. It leads me toward life to the fullest.
Are you worth it?
Of course I am. It always makes my skin crawl when I hear beautiful people say “less of me, more of him”. Why would he want a billion look-alike clones? And if he did, why didn’t he just make us that way in the first place?
Granted, I like myself. Maybe that has something to do with me not wanting to be someone I’m not.