If I am too much, go find less

“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.”

~ Matthew 22:36-39 (NIV)

It was all over the news last week that Dr. James C. Dobson passed away. The founder of the organization Focus on the Family, he was a very evangelical author and psychologist known for his focus on “family values” and disciplining strong willed children. He taught that authority should never be questioned. The ideals he advocated for tried to temper an entire generation of children, who are now voicing their own traumas at that hands of parents who thought they were doing right because they followed these teachings.

Dobson advocated for blind obedience to authority, not people who could think all on their own and speak out against injustices in the world. He wanted moralists who condemned others just as he had instead of people who embraced the love that should have been the story. He wanted legalist Christians, not people who followed both the first AND the second commandments that Jesus outlines in not one, but three books of the Bible.

Love the Lord your God with every fiber of your being.

Love your neighbor.

But wait. There’s more. That “Love your neighbor bit”…. it doesn’t end there.

LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF

Many quote that passage as taking to mean just love your neighbor as much as you love yourself. But they forget the part that states you have to love your neighbor AS MUCH AS YOU LOVE YOURSELF.

What if you don’t love yourself? What if you were told from a young age that your weren’t good enough, smart enough, quiet enough, perfect enough, disciplined enough, calm enough, normal enough to deserve love? What if you forgot you were fearfully and wonderfully made, crafted together to be the strong-willed and rebellious soul who challenged authority and had it taken from you? How can you love your neighbor if you don’t also love yourself?

We all carry baggage and emotional traumas, especially those of us who were affected by Dobson and his teachings (both the children AND parents). We all carry the weight of words that were spoken as throwaway comments, of being disciplined because we wanted to know the whys of a rule instead of just blindly following it. We all have tried to hide the very core of our beings because we were too much for those we wanted the most approval from.

We are told from the very beginning that to have any sort of confidence in our own abilities or appearance and to think of ourselves highly is wrong. I know I hear “don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back” often as a voice in my head any time I am proud of an accomplishment I have done or hear “no amount of makeup will ever make you pretty” any time I stare in the mirror because of words spoken to me. And these days, I am learning to tell those voices to just shut it.

But that commandment tells us that we have to have love for ourselves in order to have love for others. We can’t even love God with all of our being if we can’t even realize that self-love is very important too. We are all wonderful messes, chaotic creatures who have our own quirks and rebellions. We are all fearfully, magically, and wonderfully made, no matter what.

That is the part of our story that should be celebrated. And to those who tell you that you are too much…. well, Elyse Myers sums it up better than I ever could:

Stay magical, friends.

Write your own story.

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