How to Love the People Who Drive You Crazy

We can say we love our enemies in the abstract, but what about the real people who drive us crazy in everyday life? The relative we vehemently disagree with on politics? The driver who cut us off in traffic? The irritating coworker? Kaitlyn Schiess and Producer Mike discuss why “enemy love” isn’t a cliche, but the daily practice of growing in virtue, choosing grace, and genuinely willing the good of the ordinary people in our community. (Full episode: Does God Love Satan?)

Mike: I think this is the trap so many of us fall into when we think of enemy love, we just think of the worst of the worst of the worst. And we’re like, “Okay, yes. If I had to, if my spouse was murdered, I would forgive the person.” And it’s like, okay, what about the person who cut you off in traffic though?

I’ve said some things like this in a small-group setting before where I’m preaching on enemy love and I’m asking them to actually name names, not just think of the idea of enemy love. But who are the people? Name some names. And every single time, I will have at least one person come up to me afterwards and say, “Mike, I just don’t have any enemies. I just don’t, I couldn’t think of anyone. I don’t hate anyone.”

I don’t buy it. Because we do. And so it’s like, I want to almost lower the stakes on this conversation to say, “Okay, not Satan, but the person who was rude to you at the grocery store, your annoying coworker, your siblings or your parents sometimes. Like, you don’t see them as an enemy, but there are times where, you don’t treat them in a loving way.

I mean, even your political opponent is a very obvious one, and yet I think that’s a big part of this too. And so - I’m a little fired up right now, Kaitlyn, I’ll turn the mic back to you - but tell us, help us think through, okay, what does it actually mean to love people in my life who maybe I don’t think of immediately like, they’re my enemy, but man, I don’t like them very much?

Kaitlyn: Right. And I think a big way of thinking about enemies is: they’re against me in some way. So if you think in the abstract, you’re just like, “Who are a category of people that I just hate?” And it’s easy for a lot of us to be like, “I don’t have enemies in that sense,” which is good. But if you think about the people in your day-to-day life that just directly counter your desires, that’s like a really small-scale enemy. Like you said, someone who cuts you off in traffic. Someone who’s rude to you at the grocery store. Someone who, they are counter to your desires, your will.

And then when you add in this definition of love, some of us have thought, I remember as a kid thinking this: Christians are supposed to love everyone. And so I imagined in my head like a hazy glow of pink over the world, like I’m just supposed to feel warm and fuzzy feelings about everyone. And again, in the abstract? Easy. Easy to just be like, “If I put ‘category of human person’ in my brain, I love them.”

But if I think about love as willing the good of the other, then suddenly it’s like: Okay, the person who was rude to me at the grocery store, I’m not just supposed to go, “Okay, pause for a moment, feel warm fuzzy feelings about them.” I’m supposed to go, “What if they’re rude to me, they knock some stuff out of my cart, or they say something kind of rude, and then I have moments later an opportunity to either do something that makes their life a little bit easier or a little bit harder or to do nothing?” And I go, “I do nothing. I do nothing.” Right? Like, “I don’t know that person. They were rude to me.” Or, “Eye for an eye. I’ll do something that makes your life harder because you did something that made my life harder.” That doesn’t make you an evil person, and it’s easy in our world to go, “Well, that sort of standing up for yourself makes sense. Don’t be a doormat.” I think loving your enemy would be going, “If we’re both hitting the grocery store line at the same time, I go, ‘You take it,’ even though you were rude to me a moment ago."

That’s actually a lot harder than the abstract loving Hitler or loving the worst person you can think of or loving Satan. That’s harder than that abstract kind of love.

But it also, I think really importantly, requires practice. You will not in the moment have all the resources available to you to just reason through: “Okay, Kaitlyn and Mike said I should love my enemy, and so that should mean I do this small nice thing for someone who was mean to me.” You’re not doing all of that reasoning in your head. It’s, have you learned to instinctively respond that way? Have you learned that when you don’t instinctively respond that way, to repent of it? To lament it? To go home and tell someone, “I want to be the kind of person who, when someone cuts me off in traffic and then I later get to do the same to them, I don’t do it.” Or, “I don’t curse them out in my car when no one’s listening.” I want to learn to be that person. I need to practice being that person. That doesn’t come naturally to me, because I am a fallen creature, and it doesn’t come naturally to me in the moment when tensions are high and my nervous system is attacked and I want to respond in an eye-for-an-eye kind of way. That makes sense that you would, and it’s going to take practice to not do that.

Mike: Alright, so story time with Mike. There are two church-related stories, and they’re both similar. I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience where you’re driving to church and someone, the car in front of you, takes too long at the stop sign - this happened to me on Sunday - and you’re like a few blocks away from the church, and maybe you honk your horn. And all of a sudden you keep driving and then you realize, “Oh, they’re also going to church. They’re going to the same church as me.” And I’m like, “Oh, crap.”

So I’m always terrified of … I still think the same angry thoughts about the people in front of me on my way to church, but I don’t act on them. This happened a few weeks ago. I was at Costco, and I’m just by myself. I’m pushing my cart along, and the person behind me rams their cart into the back of my ankle.

Kaitlyn: Oh, that’s so painful.

Mike: And I’m just like, “Oh!” Like, it wasn’t very hard, but it didn’t feel good. And immediately I was just filled with frustration and anger. And I’m like, “Alright, I’m not going to say anything, but I am just going to shoot this guy a little side-eye to show I wasn’t happy. Pay more attention.” And so I do it - real quick, real subtle - but I do it. I look back, and as I’m looking ahead again, I realize: I know that guy.

Kaitlyn: No!

Mike: It’s a guy from my church who did it on purpose just to mess with me. He was just like, “This is hilarious.” It was hilarious. Immediately I turned back around and I’m just like, “Ken.” And he just starts laughing.

But here’s what that’s done for me. I realized in that moment: my instinct was not enemy love. My instinct was like, “Oh, I’m not going to do the worst thing I could do, but I am going to feel justified letting a little bit of this off my chest and showing you my displeasure.” And then I’ll try to move on.

It’s like: what would it look like for my instinct to be so much more gracious? That when someone rams into the back of my ankle at the grocery store, my first instinct is to turn around and say, “Ah, don’t worry about it - happens to the best of us.” Ever since then, I’m trying to operate with a mindset of, “Oh, any random interaction I have with someone out in the world could actually be someone that I know. And how would I act in a way that I wouldn’t then be embarrassed if it turns out they know me afterwards?”

That is my version, as I’ve thought about this more over the last few weeks, of: what does it mean to love your enemies? I think it means that if your friends saw you out in public in the way you interacted with this person, you would not be embarrassed by it.

Kaitlyn: Yes. Yes. I love that. And in that example, it’s both about the context and the relationship that forces you to think about it differently. I try to do this all the time - I’m not good at it - but I’ve had the experience recently. I was at the DMV, which was horrible, and I was already having a really hard day because I had just moved and I couldn’t find my title for my car. I waited too long and my registration was going to be late. No one tell the state of Illinois that I said that. But I was so stressed, I was so anxious, and I remember thinking: I wish I could transport into your brain how hard my day has been, because you would treat me with a little more grace. 

And then I thought: I’m sure I interact with people all the time who are like, “I’m having a terrible day. If you knew my context, you’d understand why I was short with you or why I cut you off.” And trying to have that level of patience and grace, which goes back to willing the good of the other. If I really desire good for you, that doesn’t just mean in the moment I want a good thing for you. It means I want the kind of thing for you that I want for myself: to understand the context, to give grace, to assume the best.

And going back to what you said about political enemies: this is one of the greatest challenges. Do I do for other people what I wish other people were doing for me? Which is believing, even if it seems difficult, that I want something good for our community just like you do. And if I believe that of someone else, could I give them grace in the places where I’m tempted to assume the worst?

I think in this day and age, enemy love is giving the benefit of the doubt to people, especially the people you don’t think deserve it, or the people who didn’t give you the benefit of the doubt.

Mike: I think what I’ve tried to spend the last ten minutes doing - maybe you can wrap us up - is that enemy love is such a profound, radical thing, but it’s talked about so much in the church that it has almost become a cliché. And so we’re not surprised that kids ask these questions. Adults have the same question: “Okay, enemy love … I guess that means I’ve got to figure out how to love Satan because that’s the most terrible person I can think of.” And it’s like, okay, but what does it look like for enemy love to not just be a cliché in our lives?

Kaitlyn: It is impossible to make sense of enemy love without the frankly unsettling truth of the gospel. If we don’t really believe in our bones that God created creation and me good, that we fell into sin, but that we are still redeemable and God has not abandoned us in our wrongdoing, then enemy love is either not possible because our enemies are real and they could get us, or enemy love is just this cliché that doesn’t really mean anything. But if we really believe the Christian story, then that means this is true of us: Romans 5 says we were enemies of God and God loved us. And if that is true for us, then that’s something we can extend to other people.

I keep thinking about this in our political world, because I do think it’s this great engine that has shaped us to believe this lie that some people are beyond saving, that some people are in themselves evil. And it is surprisingly satisfying or comforting to believe this lie, because it says there are good people and bad people, and I’m one of the good people. And there’s the “baddies” out there. And it gives us a roadmap, a way to live.

But the Christian story complicates this - thank goodness it complicates it - because one day, in our political lives and personal lives and communities and families, we will discover that there is something corrupted and warped inside us. And if we have believed this simple story about good guys and bad guys, we will be crushed. Because suddenly I’m the bad guy. And the shame we feel will destroy us from the inside out, and we will act out, we will hate our neighbors even more out of the shame we are feeling.

If instead we discover that God loves us because He made good things and desires to redeem and restore those things, not because we have done everything right, but because God loves what He made and has not abandoned us, we can look at our own sin and the sin of our neighbors without fear. We can look it in the face. And if we can do that because we have been loved in our sin, then we can love our neighbors in spite of their sin. We can love them enough to desire better for them than their sin, because God loved us enough to desire better for us than our sin. And if we believe that God can redeem and restore even us, then maybe we can want that, and believe that, for other people too.