Matthew 22:37
And he said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul and with all thy mind.
I love the Lord. I love me. I love the Lord because He first loved me. And I love me because He first loved me. Therefore I can love others and my enemies. God said we should love others as we love ourselves. That is the first and second commandment. How can we say that we love someone and don't truly love God or ourselves first. When two people come together in marriage they are whole parts not half. Some folks say they are halves until they find their mate and then they are whole. What a lie! In order to love someone you should be a whole person. Your mate doesn'tmake you whole, your love for God and yourself makes you whole. It's like if you purchase a box of cookies and after you opened them all of the cookies are half peices. Surprise! The cookie company expected you to come up with the other half of the cookie. Thats purposturous! They said you got what you paid for. No you got fooled. You should be complaining and asking for a refund. So who wants half a person?
My mother taught me how to love myself. She would tell me every morning that I was special. I grew up thinking that I was the most special little girl there ever lived. I believed tha I was beautiful, rich, sweet, thoughtful, caring, peaceful, friendly, and all of this because God was inside of me, until I was in the 5th grade, there wasn't a doubt in my mind, or a care in the world that would make me think any different about myself. I exuded so much confidence as a child but it slowly dwindled away.by age 18 I wished I was someone else. All the wear and tear on my self esteem from age 11 to 18 made me into a shy, withdrawn, ashamed, and unpopular young adult. Not the person my mother taught me to be. It wasn't until the devil told me and my friends that because I was adopted that I was different in a bad way. Here's the story: After my mom told me countless times, even before I was old enough to put into words I went to school and told my "friend" Robin in confidence and she told others and all of a sudden before I knew anything the entire class knew that i was adopted. They made fun of me. They laughed in my face, said I was an orphan, a foster child, didn't know my real mom and dad, adopted. Oh my gosh, you just don't know how I began to hate that word ADOPTED became a bad word. I can still hear the ring in my ear of that bad word. That word that I and my family understood and got joy out of but when my peers heard it they thought it was a funny word to make light of someone because in their eyes they felt as though I was alone with no family coming to school from an orphanage. That wasn't the case. I came from a loving , two parent household where I was the only child. These kids wouldn't believe the fairytale life I lead at home. But tears still ran like a river. Surely their parents had warned them about the types of children they would go to school with. That they would befriend all people if they could. Even the adopted ones. I thought sure they would be happy for me - but they didn't know what I knew and their ignorant parents didn't bother to explain it to them nor did the uncaring teachers in a Christian school! Yes a Lutheran school that taught from the Holy Scriptures, had us children dress in uniforms ,memorize stories and bible verses for homework, and incorporated the subjest, "religion" into our curriculum. Sometime after I really got to know Robin and her parents. I found that her mother and father lived an unhealthy life around their child. Her mother was an alcoholic. She had an older sister who her mother had before she married Robin's dad and that girl lived in a foster home. Her mother happened to be ashamed of her older daughter. She had autism and her mom paid someone else to take care of her. Her sister never once came to vist and her mom stayed drunk every weekend. So sad for Robin. Yet I decided not to tease and tell her secret to our entire class. At this point of my life I learned what being a true friend really meant. And never really had one to reciprocate this concept ever again.
That is also how I learned to love God with all my heart, soul and mind, despite what the children had teased me about. Oh yes I felt persecuted, taunted, fooled, and took stones at me but I had overcome them just by being a true friend, and loving God and myself just as Jesus did when he took that unforgetable ride on the donkey through the crowd who threw palm tree branches at Him.
Chapter 1 Love the Lord with all your Heart by Pamela Ford is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/3.0/88x31.png" /></a><br /><span xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text" property="dct:title" rel="dct:type">Love the Lord your God</span> by <a xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" href="writethevisionmakeitplain-pam.blogspot.com" property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL">Pamela Ford</a> is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License</a>.
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