We are excited to have started the Real Men of Village Oaks! On Tuesday, a group of boys showed up to hear about being a real man. We talked about Love and how this is an essential part of being a Real Man. Real Men understand how to be loved and how to love.
Everything was going fine until we talked about loving your enemies. Rickey and I both heard the sound of a needle falling off a record player. From the comments and the looks on the faces of the boys, you would have thought we were trying to steal something precious from the boys.
"What?! No way I'm going to do that."
"Do what?!"
In Luke, Jesus confronts a cultural teaching: hate your enemy. Jesus says love your enemies. This is a guess on my part, but I think the people who were listening to Jesus that day might have had similar reactions to the boys in the Real Men Club.
"What?!"
"Love who?!"
What the boys believe us to be stealing from them is something very precious. They believe us to be stealing part of their culture. Something they have always known to be true. If someone hits you, you hit them back and then some. If someone dislikes you, you dislike them back and never talk to them.
What Jesus is calling us to do is very counter-cultural. It is the opposite of what most of us grew up with. He wants us to love the people we don't like. He wants us to love the people who are hard to love, for whatever reason. This is the heart of God, who is "gracious to the ungrateful and evil" and "who makes the sun to rise and the rain to fall on the good and the bad."
Pray for us as we continue to confront this cultural idea with the Truth of Jesus. Both in our own lives and the lives of these boys.
-- Will Dowell
