I don’t know if you’ve ever received an answer to prayer from God, but I’ve observed that when He answers my prayers, the answer frequently arrives in a form I’m not anticipating. Case in point, for the past several months I’ve been praying daily that God would, “Teach me to love my neighbor as myself. Show me how to love the unlovable.”
As bad as this sounds, I expected that God would bring someone across my path who was vile and evil. Or maybe, He would have me cross paths with someone unpleasant, dirty, and smelly; someone who was rejected by general society. Both of these types of people crossed my path recently, but this wasn’t where God went in my lesson. He went in another direction, that I didn’t see coming; let’s look at where God took me.
I was reading “Revelations of Divine Love,” a book written about 600 years ago by Julian of Norwich. It’s the oldest extant book written in English by a woman. Julian wrote it as an account of 16 visions that God gave her over the course of 2 days (15 visions were seen on the first day, and 1 vision was given on the second day). Julian was an anchoress in Norwich, England. An anchoress was the female version of an anchorite, a fancy word for a religious recluse that lived in a small cell attached to a church.
It wasn’t that Julian was writing about loving one’s neighbor as one’s self; she was writing about something completely unrelated, but what she wrote sparked a flash of revelation in my mind. In chapter 5 she described that Jesus showed her a small object, about the size of a hazelnut in the palm of her hand. About the object, she said, “In this little thing I saw three properties: the first is that God made it; the second is that God loves it; the third is that God cares for it.” The lightbulb went on in my brain, and I had the realization that these three properties also applied to loving my neighbor as myself. I should, therefore, love my neighbor as myself, not just because Jesus told me to do so, but because God made them, God loves them, and God cares about them. Let me point out that they were also created, by God, in His own image. Scripture proclaims, “God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them (Genesis 1:27 NET).
The second portion of the prayer I’ve been praying is this: “Help me to obey your (that is, God’s) commandments.”
Wait a minute, you may be asking, what commandments am I referring to?
Jesus summed this up as follows. Trying to trick him, a religious leader of the day asked Jesus: “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus said to him, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. The second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the law and the prophets depend on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:36-40 NET).
I was inspired by something written 600 years ago. It further motivated me to obey God’s commandments. My prayer is that you, too, will be encouraged to obey God and work toward loving your neighbor as yourself, recalling those three points, illuminated by Julian of Norwich, when you think of your neighbor: that they are made by God, that they are loved by God, and that they are cared for by God. This is the start of loving your neighbor as yourself.
On the Road to Emmaus 