How to Love Everyone

In today’s world it is becoming easier to distance ourselves from those we come into contact with. As society grows, as we get older, and even as technology improves, we find ourselves in contact with more and more people, leading to a subconscious necessity to dehumanize strangers. This saves us from over thinking about everyone we see, and becoming distracted from what we’ve decided is important to us. Obviously it is true that you cannot take care of everyone in the world by yourself, but this thought often leads us to only look after ourselves and those close to us. As we find ourselves tuning more and more people out in order to live efficiently in our busy lives, it requires  extra effort just to maintain the acknowledgement of others as individuals worthy of love.

If you ever drive in a large city with terrible traffic, you’ll immediately feel like no one else cares about you. That person who won’t let you merge into their lane only cares about one thing – if they let you into their lane, it will slow them down (even if only by a few seconds). Or if the person next to you left a gap in the other lane, you may be tempted to zip in front of them to get a few car lengths ahead. Sometimes all we see is putting ourselves behind, or getting ahead, instead of thinking about saving a stranger’s time. While this may only be an exchange of a few seconds of time stuck in traffic, it is just one of many situations where we may consider ourselves more important, and fail to consider the impact on strangers.

To truly love anyone in our lives it requires us to value their happiness as much as our own, if not more. We can drive someone we care about to the airport so they don’t have to pay for parking during their trip. We can buy something for someone we love without expecting anything in return, just because you know it will make them happy. Situations like these are costly to ourselves in time and money, but we still do them.

We do not do things like this for strangers because there is no way they can repay the favor if they will more likely than not never see you again. However, if we truly value their happiness as much as our own, getting paid back in terms of a future act of kindness does not matter. We do not need to perform the same acts of love for strangers as we do for friends and family, in fact it would be weird to drive a complete stranger to the airport. However, we need to have the same motivation. Their happiness matters as much as our own, even if they are a stranger. So small situations, like when we are driving and have the option to save three seconds of our time by cutting in front of someone and costing them three seconds, are times we can love our neighbor. We can’t go out of our way to help every single person in the world individually, but we can ignore opportunities to get ahead at another’s expense, or make small sacrifices that will make a big difference to someone else. As our lives get increasingly busy, this will be harder to do. To love everyone, we have to evaluate every person that is affected by our choices, making every one of our decisions take a little longer and our lives a little more busy.

When it comes to family planning, the natural methods respect the person for who they are, and reinforce the beauty of loving the other more than self. It also respects the ecology of life, and does not resort to methods that act as abortifacients, where the respect and happiness of the new life is never considered. Although using methods of NFP require more time initially to learn, the benefits are lifelong. These days, anything that takes more of our time is difficult, so good luck.