Love Your Enemies
Love your Enemies?! Are you crazy? Why would I want to do that?
It’s kind of a difficult pill to swallow. So let’s try and break it down a little and see if we can make it a little easier.
First off, what is love? Is love just a chemical flow to your brain? Or is there something more to it? Is love just feel good feeling? Is love always pleasant or does it sometimes require patience?
Let’s define some qualities of love:
- Patient
- Kind
- Is not Jealous
- Does not brag or boast
- Is not arrogant
- Is not selfish
- Is not easily provoked
- Doesn’t hold a grudge or tally up indiscretions
- Isn’t rude
- Doesn’t rejoice in what isn’t right
- Rejoices with truth
- Able to withstand all things
- Trusts (believes all things)
- Helps others through all things (Bears all things)
- Thinking the best of others (hopes all things)
- Doesn’t ever give up (endures all things)
- Love never fails
In the Christian faith tradition the teachings say “But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.” The bible puts love above both faith and hope. Love is the quality that allows us to have faith, to have hope, and to make good choices. The list above is a description of what love is. I think sometimes we don’t even treat our families with the qualities of love, how are we supposed to treat an enemy that way? My short answer? I don’t know. My long answer… is to keep trying, to practice daily. We were not created to hate or to have enemies, we were created to love. So we’re going to fall down sometimes because we aren’t perfect. The times when we fall down we access the situation and figure out how to improve next time. We learn to love. We pray for those who hate us. We don’t condemn. We aren’t rude to them, we don’t give up on them, we root for them to grow and change in a positive way. We were created to love. Our first job above anything else is to love our creator and then to love each other. We don’t get to pick who we love… we were called to love everyone.
Loving people who you think are disgusting or bad or evil may be difficult. It may even seem impossible. As humans we want to see them rot away in the most miserable conditions, but that’s not what we were called to do. We were called to love everyone. It’s such a simple concept and yet… it’s not. Life isn’t just shadows and sunshine. It’s not just black and white, but rather grey. And the grey areas are where the good stuff happens… where we learn to grow and change. The grey areas are where we take a compass through the fog. Not everything is right or wrong or good or bad. When we learn to see with new eyes, we learn how to use the compass and find the direction we need to go in. Love. Love never fails. When using love you cannot fail. You may not get the outcome you had hoped for but you will not have failed. When in doubt which way to go use love. Seek the qualities above in every circumstance. It won’t be easy. Sometimes as humans we will take the opposite direction… we will turn away from others who need us, we will see the worst in others, we will gloat, be rude, cheer over someone else’s failure, we will get jealous, we will brag, we will not be patient, and we will not love. This makes us human, unfortunately this does not mean that we are making healthy choices. When we behave in these ways we are doing so against the Creators will. So we re-evaluate and strive to make better choices and perhaps someday we’ll will.
Our Creator was clear: Love.
Our job is simple: Love.
Our purpose is simple: Love.
Our commandments are simple: Love.
