how do you love your enemies? 23rd week thursday

How do we love our enemies?  Waiting for emotions of love to come by may take a longer wait, a longer time to develop, so Jesus prescribes instead some doable actions of love.  So how do we love our enemies?  Jesus says we can begin with three things.  First, do good.  Find a way to do something good for the enemy not because you want to shame him or her but because you want to develop love in your heart, you want to develop genuine care for the person.  To do good.

The second is bless.  To bless come from two Latin words, bene meaning well or good and dictus meaning to say, to speak.  Benedictus, means to speak well of.  Say something good about the person, speak well of the person, speak with understanding and concern about the person.  So, if somebody in a hurry pushes you aside without saying excuse me, say to yourself, O probably he is just hungry - To bless, to speak well.

And the third is to pray.  We always start with an effort to understand those who hurt us so that we can pray and intercede for them, that God may heal their hurts too and bless them.  To pray.

So how do we love our enemies?  It is never easy to act contrary to our own hurts, or to act against natural reactions of anger to our own painful experiences with others.  But Jesus said we can begin something  contrary to our tendency to hurt in return and that is to do good, to bless, to pray.  Emotions of love for our enemies may develop in time.  But actions of love such as these can already be a good start.