Loving Our Enemiesနမူနာ

“On this page I write my last confession. Read it well when I, at last, am sleeping. It's the story of one who turned from hating. A man who only learned to love when you were in his keeping.” (Jean Val Jean’s death note in Les Miserables)

This line of poetry mirrors the power of attachment love to transform us. We should open our hearts to God and welcome Him to turn us from hating and lead us to people with whom He is calling us to “attach”. And ... He will indeed lead us, as He did Christ, to love people who are hard for us to love. Loving “enemies” begins with being alert to disruptions to our curiosity, flexibility, larger perspective and relational joy regarding another divine image bearer. Then we can catch ourselves midstream of “enemy mode”, turn back and remember that Jesus lives within us. We learn to lean into the life of the Spirit and refuse to retreat into our “flesh”.

This is the kind of personal and corporate relational-love-peace-joy infrastructure we need to have undergirding our lives in order to ultimately love our “enemies” in a way that it becomes, with practice, second nature to us. 

Ask God to lead you to truly befriend a person who is culturally very different than you are.