Peggi Apick

About a month ago while mindlessly scrolling through Instagram, I came across a sponsored posts by the account @hewouldlovefirst. It was an image of a bracelet that looked very familiar, and would be familiar for any child of the 80’s and 90's.

Do you remember those WWJD bracelets? When I was in school I remember myself and some of my friends wearing these bracelets. Now, the majority if not all of us wore them because we thought they were “cool.” I would be lying if I said we wore them because we were living out the message to question our actions and decisions by asking What Would Jesus Do. I actually found my WWJD bracelet recently in an old jewelry box.

The image showed a bracelet of the same style as those old WWJD bracelets, except the letters were HWLF, which stands for He Would Love First. It stopped me in my tracks. I thought it was brilliant and I ordered a set that minute.

Those closest to me know that I am a very spiritual person. I say spiritual and not religious intentionally. I grew up Roman Catholic and I still attend mass weekly (other than in the time of Covid). I spent a year reading through the entire Bible a few years back and I start every day reading some form of scripture.

But over the past 5 years I have expanded my view of spirituality greatly. Through my love and study of yoga, I have studied some of the practices of Eastern Religions. One common practice is meditation, which is one I have been practicing consistently for about 5 years. It took a while for me to feel comfortable meditating, but I will tell you I feel closer to God sitting in silence than I ever have in a church.

One thing you learn when you take the blinders off and study other religions is that they all share a common theme. Love. Love for God and Love for one another.

And if you have read the Gospels, you know Love is Jesus’ central message.

But somehow this message has been lost.

Even so called Christians and Christian organizations fail to live out this message. Instead they condemn. They condemn homosexuality. They condemn those who have had abortions. They get behind the ultra-conservative who are aggressively trying to stop refugees from coming to our country to escape conditions any of us that were fortunate enough to be born in the United States cannot even fathom.

Now, I am wholeheartedly Pro Life and I believe we need to have immigration laws. But when I think of somebody having an abortion I feel compassion for them; compassion because having an abortion must be one of the emotionally difficult experiences a woman can ever go through. When I think of a poor refugee child trying to enter the US, I think about my own children.

As many cities across the US are still burning today after another night of riots , the answer to every problem we have as a society right now is Love.

Love needs to be the essence of every decision. It needs to be the basis of every political policy we enact. It needs to be at the heart of every interaction we have with another human being.

I truly believe if we all start with Love we can solve every issue we face as a society.

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