Praying For My Enemy

The end of that twenty – actually when I did the math it was 26 – year friendship I mentioned has had an ugly twist.  The original problem was that he suddenly claimed to have been “in love” with my daughter since she was eleven years old. Thankfully he never acted on those feelings, but he doesn’t seem to understand that he’s a freak. Instead, he makes that claim as a badge of his devotion – look how long I’ve been in love with you! She’s horrified; at 18, that last thing she wants is some 46 year old pervert chasing after her.  He flipped out; one day he started calling us at 4:45am and called every 15 minutes for a couple of hours.  When he did finally get through to my daughter on another day he told her hurtful things about events before she was born that we didn’t want her to know, and he was vicious in his attitude toward my husband and I.  She did everything she could to avoid him; including block his calls to her cell phone.  Finally he got through using a number we hadn’t blocked.

After he understood her rejection was final, he returned our house keys.  He put them in a ziplock bag, along with pictures of us and our daughter, and threw them on our lawn.  He could have put the keys in our carport. By throwing them on the lawn (with pictures!), he made them available to anyone. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and conclude that it was just a matter of wanting to get it over with quickly; drive by and throw. Not a deliberate attack on our security. But it still makes me mad.  I was tempted to take my revenge and make sure if his name is Googled people will know about this, but no.  He didn’t want to face us and it’s not from shame; he’s furious at us for keeping him away from his One True Love. I still haven’t figured out whether to report him to the authorities. But to whom? For what? At this point the only crime he’s committed is a thoughtcrime.

As it is, I’ve been keeping my gun handy; he’s crazy and I’m frankly afraid of him. We have an excellent alarm system, but the truth is in the five minutes or so it would take the police to get here, a lot of things could happen. If he kept a copy of the key to our house, there’s nothing preventing him from opening the front door, dumping a bunch of gasoline, and throwing a match, for example.  So in addition to being up to our neck in medical expenses, we have to change the locks.  Thanks so much, friend.

Aside from the hurt of betrayal and the loss of the relationship, our pride is damaged.  How, in all these years, did we not catch on to the fact that this friend was a lunatic?  Even now, looking back, I can’t think of a single sign of it.  Our daughter says there was one time several years ago when she hugged him and it suddenly felt “creepy.”  But that was it; nothing else in all those years indicated any problems.  She couldn’t figure out why it felt creepy, it never happened again and she forgot about it.  He was the best man at our wedding and if you’d asked a month ago, we all would have sworn he was still one of the best men we knew.

Matthew 5:44 demands I pray for this guy.  I do pray for him but it’s grudging.  The rubber is meeting the road in my faith and I’m coming up short.  The reason why is that I haven’t really forgiven him; I’m still angry.  Forgiveness doesn’t mean allowing him to be a part of our lives, especially because he is completely unrepentant, but it does mean:

1. resisting revenge,
2. not returning evil for evil,
3. wishing them well,
4. grieving at their calamities,
5. praying for their welfare,
6. seeking reconciliation so far as it depends on you,
7. and coming to their aid in distress.

All these point to a forgiving heart. And the heart is all important Jesus said in Matthew 18:35—”unless you forgive your brother from your heart.”

So in order to get to steps 3 – 7, I need to pray first for myself.  As Henry Neufeld wrote,

Prayer, I believe, is about me communicating with my heavenly Father. Did my prayer work? If I communicated, yes it did. It’s not based on what I get, or how God changes, or did God make my enemy feel really bad about the way he’d treated me. It’s not even about God making sure my doctrinal opponents receive due correction from the Holy Spirit. It’s about me communicating with God.

Do I believe something happens? Indeed I do. I believe that God changes me, or perhaps more precisely he enables me to change. That fits well with the prayer in the private room. When you pray that way, it’s possible God may not correct your neighbor or your enemy; he may correct you and change your attitude toward that person.

God’s going to need to change my heart on this, because left to myself, I’d probably do something illegal.