My enemies are men like me

I read this great thought and quote this morning while reflecting on Brian’s message yesterday about forgiveness.

Someone has written that hatred is like drinking a cup of poison and waiting for the person you hate to die. It doesn’t harm the person you hate, or at least not in any way like the havoc it wreaks on you. In fact, hatred has the exact opposite effect of what you would hope for; a wise man in Cormac McCarthy’s novel Cities of the Plain explains that “Our enemies . . . seem always with us. The greater our hatred the more persistent the memory of them so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. So that the man who has done you great injury or injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever. Perhaps only forgiveness can dislodge him.”

But God help us, forgiveness can be a really hard thing to do.

…not dealing with emotional and spiritual cancer like internalized rage is a disaster. It’s like ignoring physical cancer and hoping it will go away.

Perhaps my enemies are much more like us than we’d ever want to admit and as Brian mentioned yesterday, forgiving them is the only thing that can really set us free.