The Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” has been around for quite some time now. Many people will not know exactly where it originated and may be surprised to find out that it was taken from the Christian Bible. The exact wording of the Golden Rule in the Bible was “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and from there we reworded it into what we know it as today.
Love your neighbor as yourself. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. These phrases seem like they would be simple to apply to our lives and live out, but so many times we fail in this area. Some days we don’t even stop thinking about ourselves long enough to give anybody else a second thought, let alone their needs and how to love them! The world we live in has caused us to become more and more isolated, with email instead of hand written letters, and text and instant messaging instead of phone calls. We don’t reach out to one another anymore, and there are many, many people who desperately need to be loved.
If you want to live a little less for yourself and a little more for the people in your life, the first thing you should do is make a list of all the people that you care about and would like to do more for. You can even write down things that you can do for the people on your list, right beside or underneath their names. Next, write another list of the people in your life that you have been having trouble with lately. Maybe you and a coworker haven’t been getting along lately, or perhaps an acquaintance of yours hasn’t been acting very nicely towards you. This list will not be as fun to make as the first one, but it still needs to be made if you are to truly apply the Golden Rule to your life.
It will be somewhat easy to love the people on list number 1. These are the people who love you and care about you, or are at least nice to you, and it is always easy to treat these kinds of people as you would want to be treated, especially when they are already treating you that way! The people on your second list on the other hand, will be a little harder to convince yourself of treating nicely!
When it comes to the Golden Rule and people who are not treating you well, there is a fine line between applying the Rule to the situation and getting out of it altogether. For example, if you are in an abusive relationship, don’t wait around, treating the person as you would want to be treated; get out of there and protect yourself! However, if the situation is just someone you are knocking heads with or someone who is living like they have never heard of the Golden Rule, then you will have to work on looking at them in a different light and treating them with the love and respect that they are not giving you right now.