What do you hear when someone tells you that it is easier to love an enemy than a friend, and that loving one another is difficult? I think many of you understand this statement in exactly the opposite way. In a certain sense, both sides are right. Without love present in the heart, loving anyone requires an incredible effort of the will, which must maintain within me the image of a good person.
But love exists, and through me it desires to love everyone whose life touches mine.
Difficult does not mean impossible. It means that the complexity of the interaction between what is human and Heavenly within me and what is human within my opponent is far more extensive and difficult than I imagine.
Let us consider an example.
The Peugeot automobile company has a plant that manufactures a class A automobile and a factory that produces bicycles. These products have the same owner and carry the same brand name. A new car rolls off the assembly line every six minutes, while a new bicycle is produced every ten minutes. Judging by these figures, one might conclude that automobiles are easier to assemble. But this is only a superficial view.
Assembling one automobile requires approximately sixteen thousand components, some of which consist of many different connections and systems. If even one item is missing, the entire production line stops until the component is delivered and installed in its proper place.
A bicycle consists of twenty-seven main parts, each of which may contain as many as twenty components. When parts are missing, bicycle assembly does not stop. The delayed mechanism is installed later on the unfinished bicycles.
All these vehicles undergo a technical inspection and are then approved for sale and use.
Now tell me, which is more difficult to bring to market: an automobile or a bicycle? When logistics, production, and sales are properly organized, both products sell like hotcakes. Yet the difference in the complexity of their construction is visible to the naked eye, even though they carry the same company name.
Love has one Owner—the One Who is Love. By offering Himself to everyone who desires Him, the Lord gives us a finished product that successfully interacts with our human nature and perception. We tend to claim this quality of God’s character as our own without even considering how complex its interconnected components are.
Consider, for example, the brain’s response to an insulting word directed at me. The ear hears particular sound waves that pass through the eardrum and are transformed into an electrical signal. This signal, in turn, passes through various filters of identification and conversion into the brain’s information center. There, what was said is stored in my memory together with the time and source. The information is then sent to my perception, where the will processes the received impulses and decides what I should do with what I have heard, guided by the way I am accustomed and conditioned to respond. All this occurs much faster than I have described it. If my eyes see the person speaking, they also transmit his image through their own channels together with his words. His image is superimposed upon the sounds he produces, and everything is sent to the brain’s computer for technical and emotional processing.
If we are eating lunch during the conversation, taste, smell, and the sensation of what I am holding in my hands are added to the sounds and images. Even the air temperature leaves its mark upon the transmission of all these signals to the brain.
How complex is the mechanism by which we perceive the world? Yet how wonderfully and rapidly it works! We do not even think about what is taking place.
When the Lord created our world, He built from the simple to the complex, completing creation by bringing woman into the world. Everything came from the same hands, but not everything was equally complex.
When Jesus commanded people to love their enemies, He was speaking to a multitude of men and women of different ages who might not even have known God. But when He gave the commandment to love one another, He spoke it to a chosen circle of friends who, for three and a half years, had received the highest education in the entire Universe. Yet when the new commandment was proclaimed, the disciples’ minds were not prepared to hear it. Jesus therefore had to give three commandments about loving one another, all of which lead to the same final result: I love my friend, and my friend loves me.
What is difficult about that?
Love for an enemy implies a one-sided attitude toward an opponent, which I may reproduce as I see fit, calling even something that is not love by that name. But if I receive love from the heart of God, it loves my enemy genuinely through me, expecting nothing in return and imposing no mutual obligations.
Love for one another is mutual, and nothing false will work here. The more deeply I understand the principles of love, the more complex my attitude toward my friend becomes. I direct such intricate combinations of my will, feelings, and reason toward him that only the Lord can properly unite them within me so they will be genuine. If emotional coloring, my worldview, my distinctive qualities, tastes, and habits are also added, the mechanism of transmitting and receiving becomes so complex that only the equally loving heart of a friend can accept, understand, and properly absorb it while returning a no less complex combination of personal attitudes and experiences in response to mine.
Our love for one another does not stand still but progresses, urging us to devise new ways and ideas for sharing ourselves with a friend while expecting a corresponding variety in return. When I think about my friend’s happiness, I become so completely immersed in this complex process of reflection and decision-making that only God, seeing my diligence, can help me formulate through words and actions the final result of my discoveries in a language my friend understands. All this takes place within fractions of a second while incorporating the entire experience of my years of life and my victories in love and happiness.
For an enemy, it is enough to give a minimum of love without considering its variety. Yet even this minimum must be received from above; otherwise, it will appear false, or the carnal nature will come to assist.
But a minimum will not work in loving one another. I myself will quickly understand that a friendship must grow and develop, creating a variety of mutual love and joy. If this growth occurs only within me, my love, receiving no response from my friend, may stop developing further. It may conclude that it has reached its culmination and that there is no reason to complicate the relationship with additional variety.
But this is wrong. Mutual love must not become a stagnant swamp. It should feed its springs from the Creator of love, giving life-giving water to a friend’s loving heart.
I can prepare myself to love my friend, but I cannot force him to respond in the same way. He must decide this for himself, passing through the most complex process of melting down his own self and presenting to me the finished product of his desire to love me unconditionally and to do so always.
This lesson may describe the process of loving one another in a way that is far more complex and lengthy than necessary, but I believe true love will make it much simpler.
Bible Verses for Reflection
Colossians 3:14; Psalm 139:14; Ephesians 4:11–16; Isaiah 55:8–9; Matthew 5:44–48; 11:29–30; John 13:34–35; 15:12–13, 17–19; 2 Peter 3:15–16; Matthew 7:13–14; Proverbs 1:23–33; Revelation 3:18.