Loving Self

Jesus said that we are to love our neighbor as ourself (Mark 12:31), but who is this self that we are to love?  It seems rather important in this commandment about love.  Is it not true that the first step toward loving ourself is knowing ourself?  If we do not know ourself, how will we know who to love?  Is this commandment of Jesus taking us back to the primal question, "Who am I?"  It does seem that such an awareness is important if we are to embrace this all important word of Jesus.  

The problem is that we know ourselves in so many different ways. We are often unsure about who we really are and if the person we think we are is really the person we were created to be.  Do we live thinking we know who we are only to find out at some point that we are actually living in a far country instead of the land which embraces our authentic and true being?  There are untold voices which speak to us about who we are.  We are the person defined by our occupation, by our family, by our politics and religion, and by the perception that people have of us.  Do these answers to the question, "Who am I?" enable us to know the person we are to love so that we can rightly love those around us?   The difficult answer for so many of us is found in understanding that who we are has nothing to do with what we do, how we present ourselves, or what others think of us.  We cannot really know our authentic self without going back to our beginning.  

While we all bear the biological DNA of our parents, we also bear the spiritual imprint of a holy creator God.  As we move away from conception and birth, who we are becomes blurred by the definitions of self which do not take into account our holy beginnings.  It is only as we see the nature with which we were created in Christ Jesus and understand that He has come to make it possible for us to re-claim our identity as sons and daughters of a holy God that we can truly know ourself as the unique being we were created to be.  As we know that person and see the worth of the person whom God has created, we are really able to see others and love them as those who are sons and daughters of God even as we are.