Do not lay up for yourselves an earthly treasure.
Moths and rust corrode; thieves break in and steal.
Make it your practice instead to store up heavenly treasure,
which neither moths nor rust corrode nor thieves break in and steal.
Remember, where your treasure is, there your heart is also.

By our Initiation into the Church we are called to be followers of Jesus Christ and to embrace The Way. He taught us, by word and example, how to live. He is God’s revelation about how to live this human life given to us. There are several different aspects to The Way. The first, I believe, is the way to personalize our worship of God. He calls us to join Him in the worship of the Father by offering our very lives back to the Father in thanksgiving for the gift of life.

The second aspect of The Way, I believe, is the way to treat and interact with others. Jesus taught us that all humans are the children of God and, as a result of that, are related to us as brothers and sisters. This means that we must treat them like we want to be treated and show them unconditional love.

If all others are part of our human family, then the way to treat others is with respect, kindness and patience. This means putting up with some of their idiosyncrasies. It also means that we are called to forgive them if they do hurtful things and not to judge them.

This, is the challenge that life presents us. When we learn to treat others in this way, we grow more like God as He revealed Himself in the Person of Jesus.

One of the impediments to learning how to treat others in this manner can be our own experiences with actual siblings. It seems that biological families are not always without stress which can complicate how siblings treat one another. So quite often where we must begin our work at personal transformation is within our own biological family. We must, if we have siblings that we are not close to, learn how to forgive them and learn how to unconditionally love them.

Our biological family is the first school of learning that life provides us. It is from our biological family that we learn how to treat and interact with others. If we find that we have a problem with being able to unconditionally love others, we truly need to examine our past, let go of past hurts, and make an effort to adopt a new way of interacting with others.  Why? Because as Jesus said, the way we treat others is the way that we treat God.