Learning to Love Yourself

I was out of the country last week when Whitney Houston passed away, but heard about it, of course, because she was an international star.  What great talent.  What a tragic life. Adored by millions.  Suffered from a lack of self-acceptance, never thinking she was good enough.  Traveled with an entourage of up to one hundred people, but still felt alone and depressed.  Raised in a good Christian family and loved Jesus, but sadly never quite learned to love herself, even though it was the title to one of her most famous songs.

Judaism's basic daily confession of faith, called the Shema, was repeated by Jesus when asked about the greatest commandment: "Love the Lord your God, with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. And love your neighbor as yourself."  The two commandments actually stress THREE loves - the love of God, the love of neighbor and the love of self.  Many good people manage to do a good job of the first two, but fail miserably at the third. 

Genesis reminds us that God said "Let us make humans in our image ... in our likeness" ... and after doing so declared them all VERY good.  But we forget or don't believe it.  Self-love is not evil or wrong as long as we don't overemphasize it over the other two. As a matter of fact, it's just as important "AS" (Jesus' words, not mine) loving others.   If we take a balanced and moderate approach, it actually helps us be a more complete and functioning person.  And we are just simply loving the same person that God loves.

George Gallup has found out that people with a positive self-image and healthy love of self demonstrate the following qualities:
1.  They have a high moral and ethical sensitivity.
2.  They have a strong sense of family.
3.  They are far more successful in interpersonal relationships.
4.  Their perspective of success is viewed in terms of interpersonal relationships, not in materialistic terms.
5.  They're far more productive on the job.
6.  They are far lower in incidents of chemical addiction.
7.  They are more likely to get involved in their community.
8.  They are far more generous to charitable institutions and gave far more to relief causes.

At Houston's funeral service, Kevin Costner remarked that as she entered Heaven, God could finally tell her that she was "good enough."  Truth is, she was good enough all along.  It's true for all of us. Let's try to remind each other of that ... maybe even daily.

Imagine No Malaria

My brother, Rich, served in Liberia for the Peace Corps in the 1980's. Living "up-country," he helped design and build roads to remote villages.  While there, he contracted malaria.  Thanks to good medicine and medical personnel provided by the Corps, he was fine.  Ten years later, I started going to West Africa myself to build schools, and met many people who suffered from the disease.  I know what the symptoms of it are after personally experiencing them - mostly uncontrollable "chills," nausea and a few other things I won't mention.  I've never had it bad, but cannot give blood when the American Red Cross comes to our church.  Again, thanks to vaccines, I don't suffer from it much.

That is not true for many of our friends around the world.  In Sierra Leone, where I've been a dozen times, 38% of children below age 5 die from malaria.  Routinely, parents don't name their children until they know whether or not their newborn is going to live. Four out of ten outpatient cases are malaria related.  It is a SERIOUS problem.  Recent findings from the New England Journal of Medicine state that 200 million people are sickened by malaria each year. 

Bill and Melinda Gates have decided they cannot stand by and not do anything about this.  They've given hundreds of millions of dollars in an effort to eradicate the disease, mostly by funding research to find new, more effective vaccines that can be inexpensively spread through out infested areas.  Preliminary results are encouraging, with the risk of being infected about half of what it used to be.

The United Methodist Church is concerned, also.  Our denominational relief agency (UMCOR) has trained 3,500 volunteers in an effort to eliminate the spread of the disease. Some of them are in Sierra Leone, where they distributed 400,000 bed nets through Operation Classroom, part of 3 million distributed country wide in partnership with other organizations.  Village leaders were also trained in ways to slow the growth of mosquitoes which carry the malaria parasite.

I urge you to "imagine no malaria" in the world.  That is the official name of our United Methodist campaign, too.  Google it to find out more.  Let's all be part of the cure.  The children of the world are waiting for us.