Answer the question (Chapter 1, day 4)

If this is your first time here, go back to the first day.

Dear sons, 

How do we love our neighbor as ourselves? I asked your mother/MIL this morning, "When was the last time you loved your neighbor as yourself?"

I liked being a journalist much more than I have ever liked being interviewed (I remembered that when they interviewed us for the Bell County Magazine) for the same reason I would rather be taking a photo than to be in the photo. I get to ask the questions.

She said the last time she really loved her neighbors was when we lived on Shady Cove with the Dodds on one side and Sandy on the other. “They always looked out for the girls,” she said.

But is that really loving others as ourselves or is it loving ourselves and loving it when others love us the way we want to be loved. Of course, it is the latter.

I ask young engaged couples a question, “How do you know you love you fiancé/fiancée?” Hopefully the answer is not “because he/she is so handsome/beautiful” or “Because she fixes a mean lasagna.” But deep down, I know that some selfish reason is behind even the deepest profession of love. Did any of you marry your spouse because of purely altruistic reasons? (Daniel, you’re still a newlywed and she is still my daughter, so you can say “yes, I did.”)

No one would say, “I got married to this chick because I wanted to meet her every need. Everything she does irritates me but she was so needy I just had to marry her.”

The same is true for our neighbor and I don’t mean the person who lives next to us.  I mean anyone who is in need, do we just love them as much as we love ourselves? Honestly, I don’t. I work with benevolence a lot and sometimes I meet their needs not out of love but out of expediency or because it would make me feel rotten to turn down the request and again that is a selfish motivation.

People give to charity a lot of times just to make themselves feel or look good. Why do you think McLane Stadium has the name McLane on it?

I may be rambling a bit but I admit it is a challenge to love someone as myself for solely for the sake of love and to get no degree of self-satisfaction out of it. In fact, I would say it is pretty near dern impossible.

That’s why we first must love God and allow His love to flow through us. We must give and expect nothing in return. We must give our alms without letting the left hand know what the right is doing. We must look for someone who doesn’t particularly like us (let alone love us), and when that person is in his greatest need, we must put our schedule on hold, risk personal peril from ourselves being beaten up and robbed, bind his wounds, put him on our donkey, take him the opposite way we were going, turn him in to a inn keeper, pay him and promise to pay the rest of the bill when we return. And all for no personal self-satisfaction return other than knowing that he needed it.

Did I say “pretty near dern”? Delete that part!

At least that’s how I would answer if I were to answer my own question of how do I love my neighbor as myself. And that’s why I would rather ask it than answer it.

Love you, 

Dad/Pops