A lesson · When Someone Feels Like the Enemy
TeenWhen Someone Feels Like the Enemy
Why “love your enemies” isn’t the same as “there are no enemies.”
Assumptions & Caveats
Before you begin
What you should know
A teaching of Jesus’s is “love your enemies” — and there’s a distinction worth noticing in that. He never said there are no enemies. He said something harder and more honest: they’re real, and love them anyway. This lesson sits inside that gap. Matthew 5:44; Luke 6:27, 6:35.
What we're assuming
- Almost everyone in the room has someone right now who feels like an adversary — a bully, a family member, an ex-friend, someone online. We’re not assuming anyone will name who. We’re assuming the feeling is real and won’t be argued away, and that’s fine.
Learning goals
What they walk away with
- Leaves knowing that naming something as hard, or someone as acting like an enemy, isn’t a spiritual or personal failure — it’s honesty.
- Leaves understanding the difference between pretending a hurt isn’t real and refusing to let it decide how you act.
- Leaves with one concrete, felt difference between “loving” someone and “liking,” “excusing,” or “staying close to” them.
- Leaves having practiced imagining one response rooted in love instead of retaliation — without anyone telling them they have to feel ready to forgive.
How to hold the room
Before you start talking
- This is not a lesson about forcing forgiveness or minimizing real harm. Be careful never to let “love your enemy” sound like “let them keep hurting you.” Loving someone never requires staying close to them.
- Real, current conflict may surface here — bullying, family estrangement, worse. Nobody has to name names.
- Watch the pace. This can tip into guilt (“I’m supposed to love everyone, so what’s wrong with me”) if you rush it. Slow down, especially on beat three.
The lesson flow
Step by step
Each beat alternates a little input, a little doing, and a little reflecting. Skip, slow down, or stretch any of these to fit your group.
Naming It
Think of someone — you don’t have to say who — who currently feels like an adversary to you. Don’t judge the feeling. Just notice it’s there. Naming a hard thing honestly isn’t weakness — it’s the starting move.
Two Things Jesus Didn’t Say
Share this out loud: the teaching is “love your enemies” — not “pretend you don’t have any.” It doesn’t say the friction isn’t there. It says something harder: see it clearly, and respond with love anyway. Discuss: What’s the difference between pretending someone didn’t hurt you, and choosing not to hate them back?
What Love Actually Requires (and Doesn’t)
This is the important one — take it slow. Sort through the difference, out loud: loving someone, liking them, excusing what they did, staying close to them, trusting them again. Love doesn’t require any of the other four. You can love someone, mean it, and still keep real distance and real boundaries. Discuss: What would loving this person — without excusing what happened or staying close — actually look like, concretely?
There’s a piece of this that’s easy to miss: holding someone as “the enemy” in ongoing thought isn’t just a description of the relationship — it can work against the person doing the holding. Science and Health names this directly:
“Any human error is its own enemy, and works against itself; it does nothing in the right direction and much in the wrong. If so-called mind is cherishing evil passions and malicious purposes, it is not a healer, but it engenders disease and death.”
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy, pp. 400:30–15
This doesn’t cancel anything already covered — you still don’t owe anyone closeness, trust, or excuses. If anything, it adds a second reason for the same boundary: distance from someone’s harmful behavior protects you practically; refusing to let them live in your thought as a fixed “enemy” protects you mentally. Seeing someone as whole and complete — as who they actually are underneath the behavior you’re keeping distance from — isn’t the same as trusting them again. It’s a way of keeping their error from becoming your ongoing company.
Discuss: 1. Is there a difference between staying safe from someone and staying mentally “at war” with them? What would it look like to do the first without the second? 2. What would it cost you to keep carrying someone as “the enemy” in your thinking, separate from whatever it costs to stay in the relationship?
Practicing the Harder Thing
Without naming the person, what’s one small way you could respond to that hard relationship this week from love instead of anger? Close with this: you don’t have to pretend it doesn’t hurt. You don’t have to like them. You just get to choose what kind of person you are in how you respond.
What you'll need
The materials
- Paper and pens — or a shared doc / whiteboard if you’re meeting virtually
- Optional printable: Handout “Two Dials” — Love and closeness aren’t the same dial — mark where you are on each one today.
If it's not going well
When this one gets heavy
“Love your enemies” can be dangerously misread as “stay, and endure it.” It never means that. If a young person describes anything that sounds like ongoing abuse, bullying that’s escalating, or an unsafe relationship, gently set the lesson’s discussion aside and go straight to safety — loving someone is never a reason to stay somewhere unsafe. Follow the site’s mentor safety guidelines (For Mentors page) for how to respond.
For the fuller tiered guidance — including what to do if someone discloses something serious — see For Mentors.
Help this get better
Teaching this to a group we haven't planned for?
Tell us — this only gets better with your eyes on it. We read every one of these.