Today Will Be Different

The first time Michael asked the question, it didn’t seem like a big deal.

“Do you have an enemy?”

People smiled. Some laughed. “No,” they said. “We’re fine.” And maybe they believed it. There were no open fights, no shouting, nothing anyone wanted to call conflict. Just a few people they avoided, a few families they kept their distance from, a few stories that had been repeated for so long no one questioned them anymore.

It didn’t feel like conflict. But it was there—and the children were listening.

Not in obvious ways. Not sitting down to be taught. Just watching. Picking up what mattered. Learning who was safe and who wasn’t. That’s how these things pass on. Slowly, until it feels normal.

For Michael and Janet, that’s the part that stays with them. Because they’ve seen where it leads.

This is happening in a community in the southern Philippines, shaped by long-standing inter-clan, territorial and socioreligious tensions. Not always visible, not always spoken, but present in relationships, in histories, in the quiet distance between people. And in places like this, those patterns don’t stay with one generation. They shape the next.

When life gets difficult, those patterns begin to show. And for young people, the choices that follow aren’t small. In communities like this, they can lead toward deeper division, toward violence, sometimes even toward recruitment into groups that promise belonging in the wrong ways.

So Michael and Janet, local leaders partnering with INfire, started gathering families.

Nothing complicated. Just conversations people don’t usually have.

What they brought with them was simple, but not easy. A different way of responding.

To pray for the person you avoid. To speak well of someone who has caused harm. To choose not to return offense for offense.

This is what Love Your Enemy looks like when it’s lived, not just taught. It shows up in ordinary moments—where reactions are formed, and where patterns are either repeated or broken.

At first, it stayed on the surface. But then the question came back, this time a little more personal.

Who do you avoid?
Who do you still feel something toward when their name comes up?

And slowly, people started answering differently. Not out loud at first, but you could see it. A parent going quiet. A young person thinking longer before speaking. A child hearing, maybe for the first time, that there was another way to respond.

There wasn’t a big moment. Just a shift.

A parent choosing not to repeat a story the same way. A young person holding back a reaction. A child seeing something different for the first time. It doesn’t look like much, but in places where conflict is passed down, this is how it begins to break.

That’s what Michael and Janet are holding onto. Not a program. Not a guarantee. Just the belief that what was handed down does not have to be handed on.

And that kind of change doesn’t stay in one place. It starts in homes. In conversations. In the way we respond when it would be easier not to.

Which is where this gets harder.

Because it’s easier to see the need out there than to face it here. It’s easier to talk about peace in communities like theirs than to think about the person we’ve already decided not to forgive.

So maybe the question isn’t just what’s happening in their community.

Maybe it belongs to us too.

Who is the person you’ve learned to resent? The one whose name still carries weight?

What would it take to respond differently… just once?

Because sometimes, the cycles we see out there are not so different from the ones we carry within.

And the same invitation remains: to love, not because it is easy, but because it is the only way something new begins.