When was the last time you said to someone "I love you?"
When was the last time you said to yourself "I love myself?"
Do you love others before or more than you love yourself?

As early as I can remember anything I heard the mandate to love others, my parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents, God, America, ice cream, baseball and on and on the list continued.
But never do I remember during my early years hearing and, seldom in my later years, that I should love myself. What I did hear often, loud and clear, and continue to hear even now, if only I would listen, is, loving yourself is selfishness and a cardinal sin.
However, I read in the Bible that Jesus said, "Love your neighbor as yourself." (Matt 19.19). While musing over this statement I asked myself, "Did Jesus get it wrong." Didn't he mean to say, "Love yourself as you love your neighbor?" I soon had an insight that changed my understanding and practice of love. I knew that Jesus, not the advocators of "love-others, not yourself," got it right.
Self-love is not selfishness or narcissism. It is the opposite of selfishness. Casual observation reveals that behind the facade of unselfishness, even when it is a mother loving her child, is self-centeredness, not love. That same mother expressing love for her child may offer no love to another mother's child. If a mother is able to love her child she is capable of loving any mother's child. If she can love only others, or certain others, she cannot love at all and does not love herself.
Self-love is the prerequisite for loving another person. Just as a person's greatest responsibility is to himself, his greatest expression of love is for himself. There can be no greater manifestation of love than that a person loves himself.
Meister Echart contends that, "If you love yourself, you will love everybody as you do yourself. ... He is a great and righteous person who, in loving himself, loves all others equally."
Cease to be misled by or be afraid of pundits, who feign as do-gooders and masquerade as lovers while declaring that love for others is more important than love of oneself, even though it is at the expense of love for oneself. Loving oneself is healthy, honorable and noble. To love oneself, is to emulate God. God is love. In loving yourself you demonstrate that you are a child of God. Loving oneself is the highest expression of love a human can do. Without loving oneself a person is not capable of truly loving others or God.
Love yourself. You are worthy to be loved by yourself more than by anyone else and you are capable of loving yourself more than anyone else is capable of loving you.
Let loving yourself become your lifestyle. Make it a habit to say "I love myself," at least as often as you say "I love you" to another person. Being in close proximity to and of oneself is no excuse for not telling oneself "I love myself,"
People so seldom say "I love myself." Oh, how these three words, "I love myself," lifts a person's sprirt and empowers him to love powerfully, not only himself, but others without the expectation of reciprocity.

Copyright 2007 by Uriah J. Fields