Love your neighbors as yourself pt 2

some thoughts about the morning service that i attended today... i was wondering about why repentance is important, actually necessary to better appreciate forgiveness, and how this is related to the commandment of "love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind..and love your neighbor as yourself.

i think there is much of needing to temper our tendencies of being self-idolatrous, that repentance is required in order to recognize our status as ones who has received grace and have been pardoned, and keeping us in check from our tendencies to equate ourselves with God (recognizing our sinfulness to help us be aware that we are in the receiving end, instead of refusing our culpability from our actions)...i think it's also similar in the commandment..that there is more to why God put the command of loving him in relation to loving our neighbor as self...again, i wonder if he is referring to our tendency of self-idolatry, and thus needs to be tempered by loving ones neighbor because that this is necessary in order to help us to not just focus on ourselves...and that our neighbor would critique us if this was happening. but i don't think that loving our neighbor was merely functionally necessary to avoid self-idolatry...but maybe it was also necessary because our neighbors are created in God's image, that if we are to love God, that we would need to love our neighbors who are more immediately accessible and are 'God-like" due to being creatures in His image. that maybe God's commandments are not merely commands to protect from an outside intruder/perpetrator or lists of things to do..that maybe this is also something to protect us from ourselves (well, history has proven that this is quite necessary) and keep us aware of our own tendencies...whether we accept his 'commands' or not...and the command to not make idols might be directly referring to us.

Debt

i just finished a short story by Wendell Berry called "It wasn't me". The storyline is about a man who was bequeathed a farm but struggles through how he came to receive it. This man was used to doing things by himself and does not want to have any debts to anyone...one of them who grew up in the "pull your own bootstraps" mentality. It was interesting how Berry dealt with this notion of repayment of debts...and forces one to think if debts could fully be repaid in any circumstances because of its effectual influence on multiple aspects of one's life. debts in the means of monetary transactions can be paid, but can one really monetarily place value on the effectual change that the 'bought' item might bring about? one of the quotes in the story is when one of the characters talks about buying a farm:

"the place is not its price. its price stands for it for just a minute or two while its bought and sold, and may hang over it a while after that and have an influence on it, but the place has been here since the evening and the morning were the third day"

maybe we too often confuse "value" and "price" and interchangeablely use them for our own self identification. we surely misuse it well (value and price) in the way we categorize people in the workfield....that we have come to place a person working in the field becoming less valueable than one who plays professional basketball? have we distorted our own value that we have placed a price on ourselves, too often so cheaply, that our very being is revolting against us? i see this in many relationships with people whom i work with....children pricing their parents love for them, or materials measuring an individual's worth to another. i recognize that there are more things attached to the complexity of the relationship between emotions and materials...yet somehow, we have relied on the materials to determine how our emotion and identification are viewed and recognized.
i think for me, it makes it a bit clearer and more significant that Christ paid for my debt: its at that moment in time that no one else can do it; the value of his sacrifice has no price that could ever be repaid by anyone else.