"You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart,with all your being,with all your strength,and with all your mind,and your neighbor as yourself." He replied to him, "You have answered correctly; do this and you will live." (Luke 10; 27)
We have all heard the old saw, "You can choose your friends but you can't choose your relatives." As a matter of fact, we can't choose our neighbors either.
Just who are these people? How do we get to love them? Why do we even have to love them? If we love them, how do we prove that we love them?
We believe that love begets love and we observe that some of the love that we put out to some of our "neighbors" has not begotten love in return. As a matter of fact, some of the love that we have put out to some of our very own relatives has not begotten love in return.
We read the story as told by Luke in the gospel quote above and the thing that is striking here is that Jesus Himself throws the challenge back on to the conscience of the questioner, "...which of these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the robbers' victim?" Jesus then tells the questioner to "...go and do likewise."
We too know that the answer to the question lies on our conscience. So, answer the Burning Question: Who is your neighbor and what are you doing about it?
