Love Our Enemies

The Savior commanded us to love our enemies. He does this not just because we are to love unconditionally, although we are, or that our love will inspire our enemies to hate us less, although it will, but because hate and vengeance and violence only bring more pain and damage to our hearts. Loving our enemies has nothing to do with them and everything to do with us. We can love our enemies and selflessly and courageously shower them with our love and their attitudes and behaviors towards us can change not at all and they can continue to hate and attack and despitefully use us and yet in loving them they can transform from enemies into friends and brothers and sisters in our hearts. Through loving them we can see the divine potential in them. We can focus on the areas in which we have common ground and because we love them we will have the motivation and the willpower to seek that common ground at all costs. When the people of Anti-Nephi-Lehi laid down and praised God in the very act of being cut down, they died having no enemies in their hearts because they loved their brothers even as they were stabbed through the heart by them. It is hard to choose love and peace and kindness over hatred and anger and cruelty, but the more we choose to love, the fewer enemies we will have, not because the world is less full of people who act like enemies, but because we choose to view and treat them as friends and brothers and sisters. We are all stumbling through the dark leaving pain and chaos in our wake and harming people around us without intention and without thought. We rarely intend offense but so often are easily offended. In a world with a population of 7 billion, it is possible to have 7 billion enemies, and it is also possible to have zero enemies. I know that if we choose to follow our Savior's example and love our enemies, we will soon have no enemies at all.