Love Boldly

Draft of Sermon for Nov 9 and Official 22:00 Sprint 11/4/2025

I cannot speak for anyone but myself. Personally, I don't always love myself very much. I disappoint myself on a fairly regular basis. I confess that I know I cannot be the person I see in my head. She is younger, more fit, much more physically able to do the things I imagine I can do.
My body is not the 40-year-old one I see in my head. She can do things that I only dream about. She completed the application for astronaut training, rather than chickening out when she realized her swimming skills would not pass that test. She maintained her muscle memory for ballet positions. She has written the three novels in her head. She completed the two childrens' books she saw in her imagination.
She went to the political rallies that pulled at her heart. She spoke up when she was bullied by her supervisor and the parent who came in like a bull in a china shop to run roughshod over the robotics team she had created and led for years. She could explain eloquently to her students how important it was to keep their minds open and to listen to others' opinions rather than shout them down. She is not perfect but she is more, much more than I am in the real world we all live in. She can talk to her youngest sister so that their conversations are civil and sympathetic, rather than contentious and upsetting.

Not that my ability to listen and actually hear a person who confides to me, their fears, their doubts and their desires. I can and do on a regularly frequent basis. In some cases I even offer advice that is taken to heart and is somewhat helpful to them, Other times my advice is way off base and not helpful at all.

All of these doubts and fears that roll around in my head can make it hard to justify loving someone MORE than I love myself and that is the rub.

Jesus said to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, but I believe that he had a very high opinion of our capacity to love ourselves. So, perhaps, the challenge we face is not to love our neighbors AS we love ourselves but to love than MORE than we love ourselves. without the experience of loving ourselves, myself, completely, how do we know that we are capable of loving someone other than ourselves even more.

I think we have to strive to love our neighbors, everyone other than ourselves as much as we can. To attempt to love them as close as we humanly possible as our Father God loves us, as Jesus showed us when he trod this Earth, To accept the "sinners", the poor, the disabled as our own sisters and brothers, without rancor or reservation, without argument but with love and respect, taken their imperfections as the natrual way God intended them to be. god doesn't make mistakes but He does challenge us to overcome our own prejudices