Not liking or loving someone is a universal experience. I personally have a hard time loving my next-door neighbors when they leave their dogs out to bark all day long. Sometimes, when I just can’t take it anymore, I want to march up to their front door and deliver my grievances straight into their mailbox, but instead I choose to preserve the order of our neighborly relationship and keep it to myself.
Consider a person in your own life who you struggle to love. This may be someone with vastly different political views from yours, or someone who hurt you in the past, or just someone you don’t understand, but I’m sure you thought of someone. Yes, this is a universal experience. When loving another person feels like an insurmountable task, as it often can, we may choose to protect ourselves from that person, or from those around us, but doing so can open the door to a much bigger issue. When we ‘protect’ ourselves, we let hatred take precedence in our interactions and we neglect our calling to love all people.
The most dangerous part of this problem is how protection has been weaponized into hate and oppression. Systemically, policies like the segregation of Jim Crow Laws and Apartheid sought to separate and subdue certain populations to protect order and uphold hegemony. Currently, under the guise of protecting American interests and integrity, government entities conduct mass deportations, which separate families across border lines.
When protection of the status quo enables high schoolers in Oklahoma to tease and beat transgender classmate Nex Benedict to the point where they took their own life in February of 2024, it loses meaning completely. When protection of public safety dons plainclothes and becomes six masked officers whisking away Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk to an ICE processing center in Louisiana in March of 2025, the only agent at work is hatred, fed by fear. When protection of our comfort robs us of the ability to love our neighbor, we surrender our humanity. This is not a political concept. This will never be a political concept.
Mark 12:31 calls us to love our neighbors as we would ourselves. Leviticus 19:18 implores us to never seek revenge or bear grudges against another. Psalm 146:9 reminds us that our God uplifts the downtrodden and watches over the immigrant, orphan, and widow. We are reminded time and time again to carry out these concepts and to respect God’s ordinance over all earthly rule, but when it is convenient, we forgo certain steps and exclude certain people. Choosing to ignore the struggles of your immigrant, gay, trans, liberal, conservative, rural, or urban neighbor is choosing to neglect your calling as a follower of Christ. The Father who made us in love, the Spirit who moves in us to love, and the Son who is love are all examples of this.
Breaking free from the cycle of weaponized protection can seem impossible. Maybe, you are surrounded by a community who isn’t attuned to the fact that they can choose love, or that by excluding love from their words and actions, they rely on cycles of hate, but the ultimate truth is offered to us through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross: to revert from hatred is what returns us to love.
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