shirt #7: Love Your Enemies

Title: Love Your Enemies

Design: multicoloured characters with white legend on black

Make: (c) Red Letter 9






Seriously?

I bought this shirt in a Christian Bookshop in Salt Lake City (and before you ask, it was a Christian bookshop, not one run by the Latter Day Saints!) because it made me laugh. PacMan, of course, does love his enemies, when they turn blue and edible. Mmm. Yummy, yummy blue ghosties.

And of course it links two of the greatest heroes in the history of humanity: PacMan and Jesus. It even has the Bible verse in tiny print in case you’re in any doubt over who made the ludicrous suggestion to ‘Love your enemies’. And I use the word ‘ludicrous’ genuinely. If it wasn’t Jesus who said it, you wouldn’t think it was the smartest suggestion in the world. They’re your enemies. You don’t love your enemies, do you? It’s pretty much the definition of the word ‘enemy’ – person I don’t love.

Except that Jesus said you should.

Fortunately, I find it a piece of cake to love my enemies. I can tick that box with a clear conscience. There’s no one in my life I would class as an enemy, so in the words of Aleksandr the Meerkat: “Shimples!”

Except, of course, it isn’t as simple as that. If it was, this would be the shortest blog post yet, and you’d be thinking ‘Wow, that guy’s holy.’ And smug.

Because while it’s true that I don’t have any enemies in the way that, say, Spider-Man has the Green Goblin, or Sydney Bristow has Arvin Sloane, or humanity has the Cylons, there are people it is hard to love. If Jesus said ‘Love the people you find irritating…’ it would be a case of ‘Whoah, there.’

Does Jesus really mean I have to love that obstructive or obnoxious co-worker? Or the boring person who always collars me in church to have a tedious conversation I can’t escape from? Or the neighbour who gets agitated at the slightest provocation? Or the cold caller? Or the Jehovah’s Witness who knocks on my door during dinner? Or the local youths who hang around the bus shelter intimidating passers-by just by looking vaguely menacing?

Seriously, I’m meant to love all those people?

Yes. And it gets worse… ‘Love’ isn’t just a case of ‘live and let live’, tolerating those people who annoy us, and biting back the swearwords that rise unbidden in our minds (maybe that just happens to me). Love is more than toleration. Love is more than letting people live. Love is more than just biting our tongue.

Love is proactive, and dynamic, and understanding, and compassionate, and comforting, and inclusive, and warm, and life-affirming, and all those things that, honestly, I’m rubbish at being.

I mean that. I’m rubbish at loving people. I’m an introvert and sometimes I wished I lived in a cave and never had to see anyone. There’s an old joke: I love the human race, it’s people I can’t stand. Loving my enemies would be easier if I could avoid all social interaction.

But then I would miss out. Because loving your enemies isn’t about having warm mushy feelings for people instead of being wound up by them. Loving your enemies is a conscious decision you take. It can be an effort of the will. To choose, repeatedly, to love when someone lets you down, over-reacts, wastes your time, says something spiteful, or fails to keep their promises, takes more than feelings. Love – as a relationship not an emotion – is something you have to work hard at sometimes.

And that willingness to love changes you. Being willing to seek the best for someone – not force what you think is best upon them – isn’t easy. It’s not meant to be easy. If it was easy and came to us naturally, Jesus would never have had to tell us to do it.

But what about if someone hurts you, or maligns you, or seems determined to be your enemy? What can you do, then?

I don’t want to belittle this. I know what it’s like. When I was in high school a girl who was in several of my classes bullied me badly. The only reason I enjoyed French class was because she was in a different set and so I got some respite from her name-calling. She mobilised a gang of her girl friends to mercilessly humiliate me at break times, threatening me with phoney complaints to teachers, or spreading rumours about me to other classmates (many of whom ‘helpfully’ told me what was being said behind my back).

And years on some of that stuff still hurts, to be honest. It’s hard to think of her name or her sidekicks and not instantly think of words like ‘bitch’ or ‘harpy’. But there are good reasons for me not to hate her. For one, hanging onto hatred like that will only hurt me, not her. I imagine she’s forgotten about the way she terrorised me. She won’t know about my lingering hate. My negative resentment won’t affect her at all, unless you think bad vibes will have some sort of psychic effect on her. Which I don't.

So, what's the solution? A clue is in Jesus' words. He follows up the statement to ‘Love your enemies’ with the words “and pray for those who persecute you.” That’s not stupid wishful thinking. It works.

Now, when someone winds me up, and I realise I’m heading on that way to holding it against them, I try to pray for them. Sometimes, if I’m in a bad mood, I pray that God will smite them for me. But I’m careful with that. Because, unlike playing PacMan, ‘loving your enemies’ isn’t about destroying your enemies by gobbling them up.

It’s about somehow destroying the thing that makes you enemies – the hate. And you can only destroy the hate if you are both willing to love, and that means you need to take the step of wilfully choosing to love too.

And maybe being the first one to take that step.

shirt #6: Advisors

Title: Advisors

Design: multicoloured on white

Make: Threadless

Who are you listening to?

I like this t-shirt because you have to think a bit. All you see is feet. What’s going on? Oh, right, an angel on one shoulder, and a devil on the other.

It’s almost a cliché now to have a ‘goodie’ and a ‘baddie’ offering you conflicting advice, which is usually equally unhelpful. In Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove, Kronk, the dumb bad guy, asks his ‘shoulder angel’ for advice, but neither his shoulder angel or shoulder devil are much help. Eventually he asks them both to shut up while he works out what he should do.

And then there’s Dan Piraro’s clever little take on the problem*.

Just imagine if your shoulder devil and shoulder angel were that fat!

The reason we laugh at cartoons like this, though, is because sometimes we do feel caught in the middle of two conflicting viewpoints. We all know good, well-meaning, saintly people whose advice just seems unworkable. Equally, we all know persuasive, intelligent people whose advice seems seductively reasonable, but there’s just something not quite right about what they are saying.

And somewhere in the middle we’re stuck, not quite knowing what to do, who to believe, and who we should listen to.

Now, like when you were asked a question in Sunday School, in a classic Christian piece of writing the correct answer here would be “Jesus”. Just listen to him and everything will be okay. Ignore everyone else and listen to what God is telling you.

Well, yes… but it’s not as simple as that, is it? What about all those people who claim to speak for God? How come they all seem to say different things?

And if you’re not the kind of person who hears voices, you may feel that God isn’t talking to you anyway, so how can you listen to him? (And secretly you may be suspicious of the people who do ‘hear’ voices and say that God ‘s talking to them. I’ll let you in on a secret – it’s not just you! I frequently ignore them too because I suspect they might just be imbalanced.)

So, who do we listen to? The apostle Paul has some interesting comments to make on that one.

He says: “avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law, because these are unprofitable and useless. Warn a divisive person once, and then warn him a second time. After that, have nothing to do with him.” (Titus 3: 9-10)

And “watch out for those who cause divisions and put obstacles in your way that are contrary to the teaching you have learned. Keep away from them. For such people are not serving our Lord Christ, but their own appetites. By smooth talk and flattery they deceive the minds of naive people.” (Romans 16: 17-18)

And, also “see to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.” (Colossians 2:8)

So, when we’re weighing up who to listen to, there’s quite a few checkboxes on the tick-list, at least according to Paul. Is a person divisive? Are they looking out for their own interests? Do they flatter you? Are they basing their ideas on worldly things?

Those things count against a person’s trustworthiness, and the things they say may well be worth weighing carefully. (But interestingly he doesn’t say ‘only listen to Christians’. He even warns against listening to certain types of Christians. In other places, Paul quotes various pagan philosophers, so it seems character matters more than the faith someone claims to represent…)

And it makes sense to routinely assess who is giving us advice on how to live our life. Is it the latest TV chef or fashionista? Is it our friends in work or school or college, who think we’re odd if we don’t conform to their idea of a good time on a Friday night? Is it a family member who expects us to live to a certain standard of living, or a neighbourhood peer group who think there’s something wrong if you don’t want to keep up with the Jones’?

Or is it a church community that has always done things a certain way and now believes that their way is the only proper way to do things.

Maybe it’s time to push the people sitting on our shoulders off, even if they look like angels.

After all, ‘devils’ are angels too.


*I'm a huge fan of Dan Piraro's cartoons and was fortunate enough to have coffee with the man himself on a trip to New York. I recommend you buy his books!