When Enemy Love Stops Being Theory and Starts Being Pain
Corrie ten Boom, Impossible Forgiveness, and Why Enemy Love is Not a Skill to Master, But a Miracle to Receive
For a long time, it was very easy for me to preach about loving my enemies.
You know why?
Because I didn’t actually have any.
I mean, sure, there was that one bully on the playground when I was a little kid. I think he pushed me one time. Maybe stole my sandwich. I can’t really remember.
Overall, I went through life with the overarching mission to be a good hang and not make anybody angry.
Peacemaker was my nature. People-pleaser was my defect.
I was the guy who apologizes when someone else bumps into him.
When I became a youth pastor and started teaching through the Sermon on the Mount, I became totally enraptured with Jesus’s teachings on enemy love.
It seemed so noble. So beautiful. So powerful.
I would read “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” and think, Yes! This is the way! This is Kingdom ethics at its finest!
If I’m being brutally honest... I would quietly judge Christians who were cruel or angry or vicious toward their enemies.
You know the type: the kind of guys you see ranting in Facebook comment sections about… “the other.”
Despite my self righteous attempts to be like Jesus… the reality is, I didn’t really know what it was like to have enemies.
I was preaching a command I’d never actually had to truly live.
Fast forward to today.
Now I understand a bit more what it’s like to have enemies in my life. Over the past 2 decades, despite my best efforts… like most people who make it into their mid-30s, I’ve dealt with some challenging people.
I’ve been betrayed.
I’ve been backstabbed.
I’ve been thrown under the bus.
I’ve had deeply painful relational things happen where people who I thought were friends treated me the way enemies treat people.
And so… I’ve learned through experience that loving your enemies hurts. It’s painful. It’s hard to love people who hurt you!
In addition, I’ve faced enemies from the outside culture.
In my time doing public ministry through podcasting and writing and posting my thoughts on social media and public forums... I’ve had trolls. I’ve had people get in the comment sections and accuse me of all types of things. “You’re trying to lead people astray!” “You’re soft on the issues!” “You’re promoting a horrible agenda!”
I’ve heard this both from non-Christians…. and from Christians.
Personally, it’s the attacks from Christians that are the hardest.
I’ve even had people threaten me.
A year ago, after I posted an article here on Substack about God’s love and mercy, I had someone send me a direct message literally assuming that because I’m a Christian, I must be some sort of white nationalist, politically obsessed culture warrior (a hilarious claim if you know me personally.)
And then—I’m not making this up—this person invoked a witchcraft curse against my wife, my son, and my unborn daughter at the time.
Thankfully, the person doing the curse invoking was a pretty poor warlock, because nothing evil happened. I suppose they should have watched more Harry Potter as a child. 😂
That said, I now find myself at the point where I have to wrestle with the question: What does it really mean to love your enemies? Not just in theory, but in practice.
How do you actually do that?
The Impossible Command: Love Your Enemies
There’s this passage in Matthew that’s haunted me for years.
Jesus says it so casually, like He’s commenting on the weather:
“But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:44-45)
Love your enemies.
Pray for those who persecute you.
Every time I read it, I feel the same thing: a mixture of awe and absolute terror.
Because if I’m being honest... I don’t ACTUALLY always know exactly how to do that.
I know how to tolerate people who’ve hurt me. I know how to avoid them. I know how to be civil in public while quietly nursing pain in private.
But love them? Actually, genuinely love them?
I remember sitting down as a youth pastor with a couple of students, trying to teach them this concept.
I thought I was doing a really good job breaking it down. “We pray for those who persecute us,” I said. “We ask God to bless them, not curse them.”
And then they actually started praying.
“Lord, smite them!! Jesus, punish them! Lord, show them how evil and wicked they are!!!”
I was like, “Wait, no, that’s not—”
But you know what? That’s just human nature, right?
It reminds me of one of the best lines in Fiddler on the Roof. The townspeople ask the rabbi, “Should we say a prayer for the Russian czar?”
And the rabbi responds, “May the Lord bless and keep the czar... far away from us.”
Gets me every time. 😆
Here’s the thing: that’s the level most of us are operating at.
How do you pray for your enemies? Be honest. When you think about the people who’ve hurt you, what words actually come out of your mouth when you pray?
To actually do this well feels impossible.
And yet… Jesus doesn’t offer enemy love as a nice suggestion for advanced Christians.
He just... says it. Like it’s the baseline.
Like this is what Kingdom people do.
We try to soften it. Rationalize it. Find the loopholes.
“Well, love doesn’t mean you have to like them...”
“Boundaries are healthy...”
“He’s talking about general goodwill, not actual love...”
All true. All helpful.
All... insufficient.
Because personally… every time I try to dilute the command, I have to face the cross.
And I remember that Jesus didn’t just preach enemy love from a safe distance.
He lived it. Bled for it. Died for it.
Picture this: Jesus was the King who literally could have unleashed lightning and fireballs on His enemies.
He could have called down legions of angels.
He could have obliterated them with a word.
Instead, He hung on a cross with His back ripped open, nails dragging through His wrists, and He has the scandalous audacity to say, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they do.”
Wait, what?
How can You say that about somebody who’s literally hammering nails into Your wrists?
They know what they’re doing! They’re killing You!
Yet Jesus knows something deeper about these violent mortals.
They don’t really know the gravity of what they’re doing.
They don’t see the actual evil and cosmic poison of this moment.
They think they’re just executing somebody who’s on the government’s hit list.
But they’re actually killing the Son of God.
That’s how deep the Father’s love is.
While we were still His enemies, He loved us.
And that wrecks me every time.
The Day I Learned to Hate
September 11th, 2001.
I was a kid. Eleven years old.
I remember my parents telling me something terrible had happened. We turned on the news, and I saw the picture of the Twin Towers—this giant building in New York City that I’d never heard of before that day.
Planes had been hijacked by radical Islamic terrorists, a phrase I didn’t fully understand, but which my eleven-year-old brain immediately filed under ENEMY.
These terrorists flew planes into the towers, brought them crashing down, and killed thousands of people.
I remember it all feeling unreal, like the air had been sucked out of our living room.
My father, a local pastor who, to my 11-year old mind seemed to be carved out of bedrock, sat in his chair staring at the footage.
At eleven, he was my fixed point of reference. If the world came apart, he would hold the line. But on that day, the line in his face shifted.
It’s the first time I remember my father seeming afraid of something.
My mother moved around my sisters and me in that way good moms do when they’re trying to keep the atmosphere from collapsing, her voice steady while her eyes kept flicking back to the screen.
The news kept looping the same nightmare. Smoke, sirens, the towers falling again and again as if time itself refused to move on. And every voice on TV kept repeating the same answers to the question of why on earth would someone do this?
Because they hate us. Because they hate America. Because they want us gone.
I sat there on the couch, small and shaking, realizing that whatever childhood map I’d been using to understand the world had just torn in half. My mind was flooded with fearful thoughts:
My country is under attack.
People in my country have died.
What if they attack us next?
Soon, I remember feeling, distinctly, two feelings:
First fear. Then hatred.
I started to fear Muslim people.
I started to hate Muslim people.
I didn’t yet have the categories to separate a violent extremist movement from the millions of ordinary Muslim men and women around the world quietly living out their faith peacefully (many who were equally horrified at the news of the terrorist attacks)... but fear doesn’t wait for nuance to arrive.
I write this with shame now, but the reality is, at the time… I was not alone. Talk to anyone who was around back then, and you’ll learn this was the prevalent feeling of most Americans at the time, including Christians… and even pastors.
As a nation, we were afraid, angry, and ready to fight back against our enemies.
I remember that whenever we’d go to the airport, anytime I’d see anybody from the middle east with a beard, dark skin, or a turban, I would freak out internally. My mind would flash to Osama Bin Laden.
I didn’t see image bearers. I didn’t see people. I saw the shape of the threat replaying itself in my imagination.
I’d be praying, Please, Jesus, please don’t let them be on the plane with me.
You know what I realize now? When I saw the Twin Towers fall, It completely rewrote how my young mind saw Muslims.
Rather than seeing them as image-bearers of God, people Jesus died for, and people I as a Christian was called to reach with the Gospel… I just saw them as a faceless “enemy entity.”
This is the ever so common problem of dehumanization.
You ever watch a Star Wars movie and see a Stormtrooper get shot, and you think, Oh no, that poor Stormtrooper, he probably has a wife and three kids at home, poor guy?
No. You’re like, “Yes! Die! Kill them all, Han Solo! Blast em, Chewie!”
They aren’t people to you. They’re just obstacles for the heroes.
It is so easy for us to adopt this mentality. And again, this is why it’s so hard for us to take the words of Jesus seriously when it comes to enemy love.
When Jesus said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” often, Christians try to soften it!
“Well, He just meant your neighbor who’s mean to you. Not people who are actually trying to kill you.”
Really?
During the time Jesus said those words, Israel was under Roman rule. Do you know what the Romans would do?
Any Israelite who disobeyed Rome would literally get dragged out of their home, crucified on a Roman cross, and then have their body lined up along the city walls to send a message to everybody else.
These are the people Jesus is saying to love.
So when I read “love your enemies” now, I can’t escape into theory anymore. I can’t pretend it’s just about being nice to difficult people.
It’s about the trolls who curse us.
It’s about the people behind systems that crush us.
It’s about the betrayers that leave scars.
It’s about the enemies I feared as a child, even though they were humans made in the image of God.
Corrie Ten Boom And The Handshake at the End of the World
Look, I know there’s nothing unique about finding Corrie ten Boom inspirational. For those raised in the Church, her name is practically liturgical… spoken in the same breath as John the Baptist or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, weaved into countless sermons, youth group lessons, and devotional books.
She’s a staple of Christian memory… for good reason.
Corrie ten Boom is a giant. I never get tired of her.
Why? Because she’s one of the rare saints who didn’t just admire the Sermon on the Mount—she embodied it.
She lived it with bruised knuckles and tear-streaked cheeks, with trembling hands that kept opening in mercy instead of curling into fists. That wrecks me. That stirs me.
I first heard her story as a teenager. Maybe you’ve heard the basic outline, too: a quiet Dutch family, watchmakers by trade, Christians by conviction, hiding Jews in their home as Hitler’s Third Reich devoured Europe.
Corrie was caught. She was sent to Ravensbrück, a Nazi concentration camp for women. Her sister Betsie died there—December 16, 1944. Starved. Beaten. Worn down by cruelty that defies reason.
Corrie was released just two weeks later, on December 31st. A clerical error. A slip of paper.
The transport she should have been on was sent to the gas chambers.
She walked out. Alive. Haunted. Transformed.
And what she did with her freedom… is why I’m still talking about her. Corrie started traveling and speaking about God’s faithfulness through suffering. About forgiveness. About the love of Christ that can reach into the darkest places.
And one day, after she’d spoken at a church in Munich, a man approached her.
She recognized him immediately.
He had been one of the guards at Ravensbrück. One of the men who had stood watch as she and Betsie were stripped, humiliated, dehumanized. One of the faces seared into her memory from the worst moments of her life.
And now he was standing in front of her, smiling. Telling her he’d become, of all things, a Christian after the war. Telling her how moved he was by her message about forgiveness.
And then he did it.
He extended his hand.
Asked her to forgive him.
Corrie describes that moment in her book with traumatic sorrow. She says it felt like time stopped. Like everything in her froze.
Because in that instant, she was faced with the gap between what she preached and what she could actually do.
She preached forgiveness. Talked about it beautifully. Made it sound possible, even inevitable, for those who follow Jesus.
But standing there, looking at one of the men who had stood guard during those humiliating inspections, who had watched her and Betsie shuffle past naked and shivering while he stood warm in his uniform, who had been part of the vile machinery that killed Betsie, whose face had followed her into her nightmares.. she realized… she didn’t have the power to forgive.
Not on her own.
Every instinct in her wanted to turn away. To let him stand there with his hand outstretched. To let him feel even a fraction of the powerlessness and shame she once had felt.
She wanted him to know what it was like to be despised.
And in that moment of brutal honesty, Corrie did the only thing she could do.
She prayed.
Not a long prayer. Not some grand theological declaration.
Just... “Jesus, I can’t do this. Help me.”
And then… she felt her hand lift. Felt something move in her that wasn’t her own strength.
She reached out and took his hand.
She forgave him.
In that holy moment, she felt something break open inside her. A freedom she hadn’t known she was missing. A release from the bitterness that had been quietly calcifying in her soul.
Corrie herself said she struggled for weeks afterward. The handshake was the beginning, not the end.
There were moments when the resentment came flooding back, when she had to pray that same desperate prayer again and again. “Jesus, I still can’t do this. Help me.”
It wasn’t a one-time miracle that fixed everything forever.
But it was the moment when she stopped trying to do it in her own strength and let Jesus do it through her.
It wasn’t easy.
It wasn’t natural.
But it was real.
Here’s what I’m learning, slowly, painfully, over years of trying and failing: Enemy love is not a feeling. It’s a miracle.
It’s not something you manufacture through willpower or positive thinking. It’s not something you achieve by being a really mature Christian who’s read all the right books.
It’s something Jesus does through you when you admit you can’t do it on your own.
And that terrifies me.
Because I like to be competent.
I like to have it figured out.
I like to offer people a clean formula: “Here are the five steps to forgiving your enemies.”
But there are no steps.
There’s just... Jesus.
And a desperate prayer that He’ll do in you what you cannot do yourself.
The Love That Offends
Here’s something we don’t talk about enough: enemy love is offensive.
That’s hard for Christians to admit, especially here in the West.
We don’t like the idea of loving our enemies.
We like the idea that Jesus is so powerful He could save our enemies, but we don’t want to be involved in the process.
We want to cancel them. Ghost them. Cut them out of our lives. Distance ourselves from them. Move on from them. Shake them off. Set really hard boundaries so we never have to think about them or deal with them ever again.
I remember one moment early in my ministry that still haunts me.
We were all crammed into this aging church van—me, a couple of young Christians my age, and an older believer who had graciously offered to drive us to some event.
I was a young pastor in that stage of learning the Sermon on the Mount where everything feels electric, like Jesus is personally rewiring your bloodstream. I couldn’t shut up about enemy love.
I started talking, probably too fast, the way you do when you’re suddenly convinced Jesus meant every word He said.
The younger Christians leaned in. Their eyes lit up.
It was one of those rare moments when you can feel the Kingdom breaking into a conversation.
And then the older man spoke.
He didn’t argue.
He detonated.
“Enemy love is impossible,” he said, voice sharp enough to cut through the stale air. “Nobody actually lives that out. Nobody should. Jesus didn’t mean it the way you think bro. Enemies are for fighting and killing, that’s just the way things are.”
The temperature in the car changed. My young friends stiffened.
Suddenly this little church van turned into a theological boxing ring—enemy love in one corner, Christian pragmatism in the other. Back and forth. Hope against cynicism. Jesus’ words against our survival instincts.
It got so tense that one of the younger Christians finally snapped,
“Stop the car. Seriously. Let us out.”
That’s how radioactive enemy love is.
Not in theory. Not in seminary classrooms.
In real life. Among real Christians.
Maybe especially among Christians.
Why?
I think one big reason is this: very often, our enemies aren’t asking for forgiveness.
If they were begging us, saying “please forgive me,” that would be one thing.
But sometimes people hurt you and they just... move on. They never acknowledge what they did. They never admit they were wrong. They never ask for forgiveness.
And so every time someone brings them up, we relive the trauma of being hurt without the closure of that person taking responsibility.
And we cling to our precious grudge like Sméagol clung to the ring.
Without it, we feel powerless.
That’s why we need the Holy Spirit to help us. Because it’s inhuman to forgive in this way on our own. Our natural response is to hold the grudge, nurse the wound, keep the score.
But holding a grudge is poisonous. It leads to destruction.
Not theirs. Ours.
Let me confess my humanity: I sometimes think about the people who’ve hurt me over the years.
Not playground stuff. Real wounds. Ministry betrayals. Friendships that imploded. Leaders who failed me. Systems that crushed my dreams.
Sometimes, I realize, I’m still carrying some of that.
Not as open rage. Oh no… I’m too refined for that. Too pastoral.
But as quiet resentment. As cynicism. As the small, subtle ways I’ve written people off. As the mental asterisks I put next to their names.
“Yeah, he’s doing well now, but remember when...”
“Sure, she’s growing, but let’s not forget...”
That’s not enemy love.
That’s scorekeeping.
And Jesus doesn’t keep score.
He cancels debts. He absorbs wounds.
He takes the hit and refuses to return it.
That’s what the cross is.
God in human flesh, taking the full weight of our rebellion, our violence, our cruelty... and responding with, “Father, forgive them.”
Not because they earned it.
Not because they apologized.
Not because they even asked for it.
But because that’s who He is!
And He’s inviting us into that same kind of love.
The kind that doesn’t make sense.
The kind that goes against every instinct.
The kind that costs everything.
What This Means for Us
I don’t have a clean ending for this.
I’m not going to tie it up with a bow and tell you I’ve figured it out.
Because I haven’t.
I still feel that flash of heat when someone hurts someone I love. I still want justice.
I still struggle with the gap between what Jesus calls me to and what I’m actually capable of.
But here’s what I’m learning:
The gospel isn’t a manual for moral self-improvement. It’s an invitation to participate in a kind of love that only exists because God gave it to us first.
You can’t love your enemies on your own.
You can’t forgive the unforgivable through sheer willpower.
You can’t generate supernatural compassion by trying harder.
But you can do what Corrie did.
You can stand there, hand frozen, heart screaming, and pray, “Jesus, I can’t do this. Help me.”
And He will.
Not because you’re strong enough.
But because He is.
Not because you’ve earned it.
But because that’s what He does.
He takes impossible commands and makes them possible through His presence.
He takes our hatred and alchemizes it into love.
He takes our closed fists and opens them into open hands.
And slowly, painfully, miraculously... He makes us into people who can actually do what He said.
Love our enemies.
Pray for those who persecute us.
Become children of our Father in heaven, who makes His sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
So no, I don’t know how to love my enemies.
Not on my own.
I think about Corrie’s hand lifting, and I believe her when she says what happened. I believe Jesus moved through her in that moment.
But I also know she wrestled after.
And I wonder how many times she stood in front of a mirror and didn’t feel like a saint. How many nights she lay awake hating herself for hating that man again.
In the end, I keep coming back to this strange and wonderful truth: enemy love didn’t start with us.
It never could have.
We were the ones snarling at God from the hills, clutching our little grudges like sacred relics, muttering our accusations into the dark.
And while we were still convinced we were the heroes of our own story, Christ stepped toward us with that ridiculous, universe-tilting kindness of His.
He loved us first.
Loved us while we were still throwing stones.
So when I try to love the people who feel impossible, I remember I used to be impossible too.
I remember the mercy that found me when I wasn’t looking for it. And I find myself praying, in a voice that’s half-ashamed and half-hopeful, something like:
Jesus, make me radical with forgiveness. Make me strange with mercy. Make me foolish enough to love the ones who have made a home inside my hurt.
Because if the King loved His enemies all the way down into death, then maybe there is hope for cowards like me to love mine.
Further Resources
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I’m Aaron, a former long-time church staff pastor now doing ministry out in the wild. Since 2018, I’ve been building GoodLion Ministries to help young adults follow Jesus deeply in a post-modern, post-Christian age that pulls them in a thousand directions.
On Sunday evenings, I lead the GoodLion School of Discipleship, a multi-year formation program where young adults wrestle with Scripture, ask hard questions, and build a faith that can handle doubt and chaos. Through this work, I watch students move from confusion to clarity, from fear to faithfulness, from being spiritually adrift to knowing how to walk with Jesus in real life.
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Aaron, thank you so much for sharing so vulnerably and honestly. In my efforts to honor the King, I too have found how difficult it can be to love others, whether they are enemies or friends. However, I found it to be the same level of difficulty to offer true love to either, and this is where I found the truth. I didn't love others because I didn't know how to love God. I didn't even know how to love myself. I was lost in the desert of offense and resentment, needing the healing of the living waters found in Jacob's well, and, as Jesus said on the cross, I couldn't forgive because I didn't understand.
Loving our enemies becomes our nature when we realize that we are our own greatest enemy.
The journey of self-love is one of truly repenting and having our minds (soul) changed by the great Alchemist. It has been my experience that adopting the spiritual disciplines and fostering spiritual spaces to promote healing and restoration are our responsibility as followers of the Way. We are called to serve, but we are chosen by our response to that calling. Our response initiates sanctification and provides evidence of God's salvation in our behavior (i.e., the fruit of the Spirit). It is the evidence of the physiological rewiring of our mind that occurs when we submit ourselves to Jesus as Lord that we might experience the Life He died to give us when we follow the Way in Truth. It doesn't take willpower or strength to achieve; it takes submission and surrender to Him, but we always leave out the obedience aspect of that surrender, in that it takes action on our part to manifest the truth of our salvation for His glory, on earth as it is in heaven.
The good news here is that Christian culture is starting to catch up to the truth of the past: Jesus never changes, but He is always doing something new.
As Kierkegaard pointed out, it is rarely ever either/or in life, and more often it is the both/and principle that sheds light on the Way.
We don't have to try harder to be good; we have to serve God faithfully, and He will restore us to righteousness. It's not either grace or law, it's both/and. It's not works or faith, it's both/and. It's not all Him and none of us; it's both/and. WE are called to be a part of His mission, and God wants us to be Jesus with skin on to our brothers and sisters.
Could God do everything without us? Sure. But He didn't. He chose to include us in His ministry, and for us to keep deprecating ourselves and the value that He has given us inherently as His children is a trick of the enemy. We are called to shine brightly on the hillside, not hide our brilliance; the brilliance that is the reflection of our source. The moon doesn't take credit for reflecting sunlight; it just does.
Allow God to continue to heal your heart. Ask Him about areas of trauma that haven't been resolved yet; Hint: they are usually the areas in which we struggle to forgive others (because we haven't forgiven ourselves for that same thing), and then loving your neighbor (enemy or not) will be the natural outflow of your heart.
This is how they will know we are His.
Stay faithful, brother, peace and grace to you.
This stuff is harder than we like to admit. Thank you for being real about it.