There’s a line I’ve been thinking about: to love your enemies is to love them as enemies. It sounds simple, but it’s probably one of the hardest truths to live with. Most of the time when we say we “love” someone who has hurt us, there’s a quiet hope tucked underneath it—that maybe they’ll soften, maybe they’ll finally see our side, maybe we’ll win them over in the end. But real love, the kind that frees us, doesn’t have that agenda.
To love an enemy as an enemy means accepting that they may never understand you. It means seeing them as they are—still distant, still cold, still opposed—and choosing to stop feeding the bitterness that keeps you tied to them. It’s not forgiveness that erases what happened. It’s more like loosening the knot around your own heart so you can breathe again.
We want so much for love to fix things. We imagine the lion lying down with the lamb, harmony restored, no more danger or pain. But here, in the real world, lions are lions and lambs are lambs. Sometimes peace doesn’t come through transformation but through recognition—through the quiet decision to stop demanding that life become paradise before we can rest.
Loving your enemies, then, isn’t about moral achievement. It’s about letting go of the illusion that everything broken can be made right by sheer goodness. It’s understanding that love is not control; it doesn’t bend others into shape. Sometimes it simply stands there, open and unarmed, refusing to carry hate any longer.
And maybe that’s enough—that even in a world where lions still hunt and lambs still tremble, a person can stand in the middle of it all and choose not to hate back. Not to pretend the danger isn’t real, but to live unpoisoned by it. That’s a kind of love the world rarely sees, but it’s the kind that heals the one who gives it.