Love Allows Us to See the Face of God in Everyone

“Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”

Gospel of John

How has God loved us? Passionately. Greatly. Unconditionally. Powerfully. Equally. God’s love for everyone is equally as great, as unconditional and as powerful. God has no favorites. No one is “more” to God or “less” to God than anyone else. We are all equal in the eyes of God and we are all equally loved by God. And so our calling is to love each other equally, just as God loves us.

This means we need to come to terms with our fears concerning our own lovability. We must believe God loves us without fail and we must learn to love ourselves in the same way. We must then love others as we are loved by God and ourselves. To do so we have to come to term with a further set of fears: Fears about those who are different from us and fears of those who we simply don’t understand.

In order to set aside our fears about those who are different from us, we need to lesson the grip of ignorance. We need to better educate ourselves about people who are different, whether the difference be about culture or religion, ethnicity or gender, sexual orientation or skin-color. The more we learn about those we fear, and thus dislike out of the ignorance that is fueling our fear, the more we will see the human-connection that unites us; the more we will see that we are more alike than different; and the more we will see that our differences our of little importance. We will no longer see an Asian person or an Anglo person, we will no longer see male or female, we will no longer see gay or straight and we will no longer see Christian or Muslim. We will see the face of God. Once we look past our differences, we see the image and likeness of God in everyone who exists in this world. No Exceptions.

Take some time today to think about the people you feel prejudicial towards. Ask yourself “Why do I feel this way?” The answer will be, most likely, because as a child I was taught to feel this way by adults who were fearful of people who were different, but of whom they also knew relatively nothing about. Their fear was fueled by ignorance and innuendo. As an adult today, Yours doesn’t have to be. You can dissolve your fears by educating yourself about those persons who stir-up prejudicial thoughts in your head. You can begin to challenge those thoughts as wrong, and you can begin to dismiss them by refusing to own them or empower them in any way. Instead you can choose to see the image and likeness of God in all of their faces and to love those very people as God has loved you. It is what we are all called to do by God.

Begin right now. The more you love others as God loves you—compassionately, greatly, unconditionally, powerfully, passionately and equally—the sooner this world will become a better place for all of us.