Good words from Henri Nouwen
Are we friends with ourselves? Do we love who we are? These are important questions because we cannot develop good friendships with others unless we have befriended ourselves.
How then do we befriend ourselves? We have to start by acknowledging the truth of ourselves. We are beautiful but also limited, rich but also poor, generous but also worried about our security. Yet beyond all that we are people with souls, sparks of the divine. To acknowledge the truth of ourselves is to claim the sacredness of our being, without fully understanding it. Our deepest being escapes our own mental or emotional grasp. But when we trust that our souls are embraced by a loving God, we can befriend ourselves and reach out to others in loving relationships.
The words from Jesus are "love your neighbour as well as you love yourself."
As a good friend said to me recently "if you cannot love yourself then you kill the life within and this is your sin." How much do we kill the sacred life that is ours by not loving, and befriending ourselves, as Jesus asked us to? It seems to me that as I love myself then I am also learning to live in obedience to the life the Spirit holds within me, letting Light be exchanged for darkness within. I cannot say I do live this way, but I am wanting to, learning to, letting the work be done, so that I will live more this way.