“Are we supposed to love everyone?” I often hear this question coming from others, and it’s actually one I wrestled within myself for years. To me, that answer is very simple now, and it’s a resounding “Yes!” But how I arrived there took me going down a long, circuitous route that all boiled down to the fact that I never loved myself enough to truly love another.
The Bible, and many of the other world religions have one thing in common, and that’s the saying of “Love thy neighbor as thyself”. Because I didn’t love myself that much for a good chunk of my life, I always struggled to love any of my “neighbors”. To put this in a different way, I hated myself for years, I used to despise what I saw in the mirror, and it was once next to impossible to say I truly loved myself. All that resulted in was looking at the rest of the world through a tainted set of eyes. With them, the only things I frequently saw in others were their imperfections and character defects, because that’s all I saw in myself. In other words, what I consistently saw in others was what I didn’t like in myself.
When I began to draw closer to God though, I started working through all those things I didn’t like in myself. I took a hard look at all of my own imperfections and character defects. In all honestly, it was a difficult job to do, but certainly worth it because the more I worked on accepting my imperfections and removing my character defects, the more I began to like myself. And the more I began to like myself, the more I began to see everyone else through a healthier set of eyes and in a much better light. By continuing this work on myself, I also eventually became able to look in the mirror and say, “I truly love myself unconditionally” and mean it. But even better, all this world helped me to start noticing the good in everyone, even the ones who used to irritate me.
Nowadays, I’m find it’s much easier to embrace the positive qualities of everyone rather than focus on any of their negative ones. I also don’t find myself getting caught up in tearing someone’s character apart anymore like I once used to and I think that’s solely because I really do love who I am today. The love I have for myself now allows me to see everyone else with love and I’m quite grateful for that. That’s a far cry from where I used to be when I despised my life so much that I could only notice the things I despised in everyone else as well.
So is it possible for all of us here on Earth to truly love one other? Absolutely! But I believe the only way to ever get there is to fully accept our imperfections and remove all of our character defects that are selfish in nature. Following this path will definitely help each of us love ourselves so much so that once we do, loving any of our “neighbors” will just become second nature.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson