"But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" - Jesus of Nazareth, as recorded in Matthew 5:44 (NIV translation)
Our ego or self-importance is our biggest enemy. Ego controls us via feelings. The bigger is our ego the more are we controlled by the feelings and the bigger is the chance that we will get heart more easily. It grows bigger and bigger when it is admired and gets smaller and smaller when it is offended, that is when we feel the emotional pain.
I am fairly sure that you had or still have an enemy who you hate or just do not like as a person. How do you feel when you are around that person? How do you feel when you know that for some reason you have to have a conversation with that person? Not well of course.
Why do you feel this way? It is because they are the only people who do not admire your ego and most of the time they offend it making it grow smaller and smaller and don’t get me wrong I am not saying that people who admire you are your enemies because they make your ego grow bigger. They are making it grow bigger, but they do not do it intentionally.
One of the best types of enemies are bullies because they make us feel so bad about ourselves that we forget how important we are, our ego gets offended and starts getting smaller taking us away from the island of egocentrism.
In your mind create an image of a little boy and give him a name in my case I will name him George. Now create another image in your head – an image of the bully who will give George a hard time. His name will be Larry. Let us say they go to the same school and they have all of the same classes together.
Everyday Larry makes fun of George saying things about how he is dressed, how his mother always brings him to school and how he is so skinny and little, how scared he is from everything and how unimportant he is to everybody.
George on the other hand cannot do anything at all because he knows that Larry is stronger than him and if he says anything to Larry he will hurt him.
Years pass by and after five years same thing happens to him when he is in high school. There is another bully whose name is Gregory. He does almost the exact same thing to George as Larry. Throughout those years George starts feeling so unimportant that his self-importance almost vanishes. He does not care about anything and he starts hating life.
When he goes to college same thing happens again and again when he gets a job. One day he realizes that his life is worthless and he falls into a deep depression.
As you can see George’s ego was almost on the verge of vanishing, but instead of being happy about it he was depressed. It is because he did not know what was going on with him. He did not see that gift that he got throughout those years. Therefore the morale is love your enemies knowing that when they are offending your ego they are actually making it disappear and doing you a huge favor. Look at them as tools rather then as human begins, because you are only going to use them to make your ego vanish. George was looking at them as merely enemies who did not like him and he failed because he did not have the knowledge. You know better then George and you have the knowledge so go ahead and start fighting your ego.
