Scripture: Galatians 5:14-16
For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” If you keep on biting and devouring each other, thumb watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.

Thought for the Day: We all know this command, online to love our neighbors (and Jesus would say even our enemies) as ourselves. Yet even a cursory study of history reveals a humanity that seems obsessed with biting and devouring each other. We know we’re supposed to love each other, ampoule but how come it’s so difficult to actually do that?

Well, Paul would probably blame it on sin, which separates us from God and causes us to become nervous and possessive creatures. We feel separate from God’s love, so we separate ourselves from each other’s love as well. We divide into the “haves” and “have-nots,” like the Sneetches, when in truth, every human on the planet has the love of God and the Consciousness of the Christ (no matter what it’s called in other faiths) within them. There are no “have-nots” anywhere on the earth. We’ve just made artificial rules to make it seem so.

We have trouble loving our neighbors and eliminating the idea that anyone is an enemy from our consciousness, because we are stuck in an endless, human-created cycle of consumption and disposal, and worse, consumption is almost always at the expense of someone else (or the environment). Loving each other and loving God with all our hearts is how we were built. Whether we call it sin or detachment or any of the other terms philosophers have used to describe humanity’s broken state, it’s obvious: our engine is broken. We need a tune-up, perhaps an outright new engine, and this can only be provided by a force much more powerful than ourselves. God is willing to tune us up and even give us a completely new engine, so we can be the loving and selfless beings we truly are. But we have to be willing to take the car in for repair in the first place.

Prayer: Guide me, Holy Mechanic, to your repair shop to receive the tune-up or complete overhaul I so desperately desire, and that the world so desperately needs. Amen.