Loving Folks

If you must love your neighbor as yourself, it is at least as fair to love yourself as your neighbor. ~ Nicolas de Chamfort

To love yourself is natural,
not something to be shunned.
But some of us...many of us
who find ourselves at home
in the rooms of recovery
miss out on that natural truth.
We attack ourselves with food,
with alcohol, drugs, sex, shopping.
gambling...trying to find the love
for ourselves that should be nature.
But instead we loath ourselves,
certain nobody else could manage
the herculean task of loving us,
knowing God loved the world
but surely not us, proof-texting
the Bible sure it never tells me,
"Jesus loves me!" But we come,
we come to, we come to believe,
eventually finding it natural
to love ourselves as much
as we love other people!