There’s a children’s song “love is something if you give it away it will come right back to you”. This week Advent 4 is all about love. I remember when my husband was alive, he would tell me every day about how much he loved me, and we wanted to remind each other of that every day. But it can also be a word that we can so often take for granted. There’s that ad on television of the French woman throwing rocks at the window saying how much she loved Jeffrey – very funny. We can be so overwhelmed with loving others and loving our neighbours but not necessarily have any idea how to love ourselves. We are to love our neighbour as we love ourselves. Do we know how to do that? Do you love yourself? What do you do each day that is just for you? I know when you live on your own it feels kind of selfish because there’s no one else around but yourself, but it is still easy not to know how to love yourself. Am I right? We get up in the morning, we have might have breakfast and we eat to survive throughout the day, and we carry on with our day to day living for ourselves and whoever else we might be sharing our lives with. I remember being asked by my supervisor in my early years of ministry “how do you look after yourself?” I just sat there and didn’t quite understand the question. What does she mean how do I look after myself? Well, I get up in the morning and shower, I eat 3 meals a day, I go to work, I come home. What is she referring to? I actually didn’t understand the question because I have always lived my life for my family and being Samoan is quite altruistic, always leaving ourselves last; it is not individualistic, so I didn’t really understand the question back then. But today yes, I understand it very well. What are the things that I do that add to my sense of self love and integrity, do I give myself time to put my needs first? At the end of the day unless we know how to love ourselves, we will have difficulty loving others, because we are called to love our neighbours as we love ourselves.
Over this Christmas period for some of us we will be doing a lot of loving with our families, sharing and receiving gifts, and for others we will be on our own not giving or receiving any presents but just looking after ourselves and carrying on our lives the only way you know how. Shirley Murray’s hymn “Where is the room, where is the house of Christmas, where shall we welcome Jesus, where are the signs of home?” is one of my favourite Christmas songs because it reminds us to look for those signs of home wherever we are and wherever there seem to be signs of hope.
I will have one more E News next week and then we will have a break until mid-January when we start up again. I’m off to Auckland for the day on Saturday for family celebrations and back for Sunday worship. Enjoy your weekend, Fei.
You can read the full E-News here: https://mailchi.mp/caa5b1cd86a6/this-weeks-newsletter-from-st-andrews-on-the-terrace-9270311
