The afternoon was overridden by a casual yet worthy expression one of my buddies made while having late lunch. What he so candidly mentioned while observing that I was carrying the book 'A girl's guide to loving God' (By Michelle Hammond) was 'Ha...you gotta love yourself first'.
And he said it with an absence of sarcasm -I knew he was saying something which carried weight to it. He is a non Christian but I can sense that he has a place in his heart for the truths which God sometimes gives me the opportunity to share with him.
That remark went into me introspectively - it was like a jigsaw piece that was revealed to me, - I dont have all the pieces, but He gives it to me one at a time, -so that I know the adjoining pieces that I should discover, all the while gaining a clearer perspective of the picture.
It is not then who comes first - should we regard loving ourselves before loving God? No. For it is said that one should love God with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind.
It is a combined effort of the two - loving God so that we can understand how He made us to be, and we can work towards improvement with a better understanding of ourselves.
By loving God, we can learn to love and relate ourselves better.
Not that his remark considered anything out of focus, it was within the focus, though I come to conclude now that we can never truly appreciate the who we are if we dont first appreciate the love that we were created out of - that we come to respect and to understand ourselves more the better through loving our Saviour in the first place.
God is Love.