And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

Mark 12: 30-31

On Monday I focused on verse thirty in the passage above, but Christ also gave considerable weight to the second verse in the quote above. In response to our love for God, we are to love our neighbors, and this kind of love begins in the home.

While he was still a young man, Jonathan Edwards realized the importance of family relationships:

“Resolved, never to allow the least measure of any fretting uneasiness at my father or mother. Resolved to suffer no effects of it, so much as in the least alteration of speech, or motion of my eve: and to be especially careful of it, with respect to any of our family.”

Unlike Edwards, I am long past my twenty-first birthday and I’ve read those words before. As a child, as a father, and a friend, I’ve made many mistakes along the way, but that shouldn’t keep me from moving forward in 2021 as a more loving son, father, and friend.