Contemplating Enemy Love

Dear God of Love and Justice,

Martin Luther once wrote that a Christian lives not in himself but in Christ and in his neighbor — in Christ through faith, in his neighbor through love. Today I bring before You the hardest neighbor of all: the one I would rather forget, the one whose name tightens my jaw and quickens my pulse.

Acts 2:17-18 tells us that Your Spirit will be poured out on all flesh — sons and daughters will prophesy, young and old will dream Your dreams. All flesh, Lord. Not just the flesh I find easy to love. You poured out Your Spirit on a church that included both the zealot and the tax collector, people who in any other room would have been at each other's throats. Yet there they stood, shoulder to shoulder, speaking the same fire.

Teach me that kind of reckless grace. When I rehearse old arguments in the shower, when I scroll past someone's name and feel that familiar knot in my stomach, remind me that Your Spirit does not ask my permission before landing on the people I have written off. You dreamed of their redemption long before I learned to resent them.