Seeing God in Others
The first and most important step you must take is to acknowledge and believe that you are the beloved child of God. You might feel unworthy of God’s love, but you don’t get to choose our parents, do you?
“It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you…”
Upon realizing that God loves you personally, it must also be understood that God loves all people this way, even those who don’t love him. A parent never stops loving their child, even when that child rebels and acts out and does evil things. You remember the story of the Prodigal Son.
God loves the saints and the sinners. The toughest part is that you should to. It’s easier said than done, in fact, for most of people it is almost impossible. However, we are not depending on our own capacity to love, but on the grace of God working through us and helping us to share His love with others.
So pray about it. Ask God to help you see all people as your brothers and sisters. Love them, not for what they do, but for who they are… beloved children of God.
“Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.”
Mother Teresa mastered this. With the help of God’s grace she was able to see God in the people that she served—the poorest of the poor, the sick and the dying—and she loved them. She treated them as if each person was Christ Himself.
Two Birds with One Stone
Many modern people think religion, especially Catholicism with it’s rules and rituals, asks too much of them. That’s understandable. However, God doesn’t give you tasks that you can’t handle. There was one rule in the Garden of Eden (Gen 2:16), Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai (Ex 20), and a whopping 613 in the Law of Moses, but Jesus—whether you fashion Him a genius or Mr. Obvious—took all of the rules, commandments, and laws and put them into two new commandments, the greatest commandments. He said it this way:
“You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”
The first three of the Ten Commandments call us to love God and the other seven to love our neighbor. So Jesus streamlined it for us, simplifying what may of seemed burdensome and over complicated to many, allowing us to kill two birds with one stone. The interesting thing is that you can’t love God without loving your nieghbor, and you can’t love your neighbor without loving God. You can’t have one without the other. What is your biggest challenge in living God’s plan for love? And what can you do to overcome it?