Love your neighbor as yourself…

I think that overall we have a good understanding about loving our neighbors.  Things like blood drives, Habitat for Humanity builds, mission trips to impoverished  areas, Doctors Without Borders, food pantries, and canned food drives have become commonplace not only in the church, but in our neighborhood and community organizations.  We can love our neighbors.  We can hope for the best for their families and children.  We can go to an event or spend a week in mission and then return to our comfortable routines. 
Let’s consider what happens when we love so much we can feel it, when our routines are replaced by the messiness that is loving your neighbor as yourself?  How easily and how often are we doing that?  What does it look like to love someone as I do myself?  This kind of love is hard within the walls of our own homes.  It is you go first love, you take the remote love, and you pick the thermostat temperature love.   As yourself love takes time and energy keeping the ego in check in order to put the needs of others before your own.  As yourself love can be hard to show to those who are easy to love. As yourself love is sacrificial love.  Yet, Jesus keeps gently calling out, love them as yourself, love your spouse, your sibling, your child, your neighbor.  Make sacrifices for them; get into the messiness of life with them.

 So, let us answer this call to love those around us, yes including our neighbors so much that we feel it!