Honor your father and your mother

To honor our father and our mother is to love them. We don’t love people because they deserve to be loved. That is not love. That is barter.

To love people because they love us is not love. That is negotiation.

Love is a higher calling. It doesn’t depend on a person’s worthiness or on our feelings. Jesus tells us the real measure of love: our Father in heaven who lets the his sun rise on both the good and the bad alike. Can anybody beat that? I don’t think so, but that is the standard. So when our love is selective, perhaps we shouldn’t call it love.

To love our father and mother is to reconcile ourselves to our personal history and to the imperfections of life.

It isn’t easy. Who says it is? But it is the only way to find peace, healing, a way to move forward in life.