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.
Life sure would be a lot easier if Jesus told us that we needed to love only the people we want to, instead of saying that we needed to love our neighbor as our self. Loving is not always easy: people rarely live up to our expectation; even our best friends sometimes let us down; and sometimes people are just mean.
I guess God could say the same about us: we rarely are the person that God created us to be; we are constantly sinning and falling short; and often we're just plain mean. I'm pretty sure that if I were in Jesus' place I would say something like: "You want me to die for these people?". Yet God is so awesome that in the midst of our failings He continues to love us. He probably isn't happy with some of the choices we've made, but no matter how horrible they were, He's waiting with open arms to welcome us back. All we need to do is to turn back to him and ask for forgiveness.
It's a huge challenge to love our neighbor. Our "neighbor" includes those who cheat in school, those who cut us off in traffic, the one who profits off our misfortune... We're called to love all of them. Even when our neighbor doesn't love us, we need to be there to love them. What prejudices block God’s love from flowing out from you to others?
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