Monday in the First Week

Leviticus 19:1-2,11-18; Psalm 19:7-14; Matthew 25:31-46
"You shall love your neighbor as yourself."  It sounds like a cliche or a joke, but I mean it when I say I need a higher standard.  Over my lifetime I have neglected my health, overlooked my emotional needs, abandoned myself and my beliefs, betrayed myself in subtle and overt ways.  I put up with miserable living conditions and poisoned my body with various substances.  And I have too often loved my neighbor in the same way.
As I struggle to love others more fully, I find others who push me to love myself better.  I'm grateful for Elizabeth, who will lean on me to get that checkup or test, who says it's important to have a decent bed or shoes that support me.  I'm grateful for others who help me make good choices in food and exercise, and who help me use my gifts for the good of others.
But how do I extend that care to loving others better?  Where does self-care become self-centeredness?  This is not a matter of balancing my needs against those of others, giving others my excess above my comfortable lifestyle.  That's not loving them as myself.  It has to begin with changing my vision so I can see that they are me, or I am them.  Our fates are intertwined.
The commands from Leviticus are a code of neighborly conduct.  They concern how I am to treat those with whom my life is intertwined - not just those I would choose to have it be, but those who are inescapably part of my world.  The children who need education, the adults who need decent wages, the citizens who need clean water and electricity and decent roads, the people further away who are losing their land to global warming and rising seas - our lives are one fabric.
How will your Lenten transformation change the way you treat your neighbor?  Where can you start today?