My family has been enjoying the Canadian show Heartland for 2 seasons now. Last night we watched “Step by Step,” the 18th and final episode of season two of the CBC family drama Heartland. It originally aired on March 22, 2009. In this episode, Amy and Ty are stranded at a remote mountain cabin during a blizzard while trying to feed wild horses.

While watching the episode, I noticed a theme that also appears in my book Redeeming Rhubarb: an enemy helps when someone is in danger. In one subplot, Lou finally confesses to Jack that she is dating Peter, the oilman. The oilman is considered the enemy of Grandfather Jack. In fact, Jack doesn’t want Peter in the house and calls him the enemy, but when Peter learns that Amy and Ty are trapped, he offers to help. He sends crews with plows to clear the road, allowing Amy and Ty to return home.

In Redeeming Rhubarb, a rat named Barnabas moves into Rhubarb’s neighborhood. Rhubarb is a mouse and hates rats. Barnabas is considered an enemy; however, when Rhubarb’s daughter needs help, Barnabas risks his life to save her, echoing Peter’s help to Amy and Ty and reinforcing the same theme.

Loving Our Enemies

What struck me about both stories is that neither Peter nor Barnabas waits for the person who considers him an enemy to change his mind first. When someone is in danger, he simply helps.

That raises a difficult question for families to discuss: What does it mean to love our enemies?

It is easy to be kind to people who are kind to us. It is easy to help our friends, defend the people we like, and show compassion to people who agree with us. The real test comes when the person who needs help is someone who dislikes us—or even someone we dislike.

Jesus gave His followers a challenging command:

“But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you,” — Luke 6:27 (KJV)

Notice that Jesus doesn’t merely tell us not to hate our enemies. He tells us to love them and do good to them.

That is exactly what makes the actions of Peter and Barnabas so interesting.

Peter: Helping the Family That Rejects Him

Jack has already decided what Peter represents. Peter is the oilman—the enemy. Jack doesn’t even want him in his house.

Yet when Amy and Ty are stranded during the blizzard, Peter has an opportunity to respond to that hostility. He could have thought, Jack doesn’t want me around, so why should I help his family?

Instead, he uses the resources available to him. He sends crews and snowplows to help clear the road.

Peter’s actions don’t instantly erase the conflict between him and Jack. They do something more important: they challenge Jack’s picture of who Peter is.

The man Jack has labeled an enemy behaves like a neighbor.

Barnabas: Loving Someone Who Hates Him

Redeeming Rhubarb takes this idea even further.

Rhubarb doesn’t simply dislike Barnabas personally. He hates rats. His prejudice tells him what Barnabas must be before he ever gets to know him.

Barnabas has every reason to dislike Rhubarb in return.

But when Rhubarb’s daughter, Strawberry, falls into a storm drain and is in danger, Barnabas has a choice. He can allow Rhubarb’s hatred to determine how he responds, or he can do what is right regardless of how Rhubarb feels about him.

Barnabas chooses to help.

He risks his own life to save the daughter of a mouse who considers him an enemy.

And that creates a problem for Rhubarb.

If rats are terrible simply because they are rats, what does Rhubarb do with a rat who risks his life to save his daughter?

Barnabas’s actions throughout the book confront Rhubarb’s prejudice in a way that an argument probably never could.

He doesn’t preach. He doesn’t confront. He doesn’t argue. He helps.

And he keeps helping.

When Our Enemy Doesn’t Act Like an Enemy

That’s one reason stories like these can lead to valuable conversations with our children.

Children—and adults—can easily divide people into categories: good people and bad people, friends and enemies, people like us and people unlike us. And this temptation isn’t limited to one side of a conflict. Once we see someone as an enemy, it becomes easier to judge everything that person does through that label.

Reading With Your Kids put it this way in its review of Redeeming Rhubarb:

“Rather than presenting prejudice as something only ‘bad people’ possess, Bob Richley portrays it as something that often grows from fear, pain, grief, and unresolved wounds.”

That distinction is important. Understanding why someone has developed prejudice doesn’t mean excusing it.

Sometimes moral distinctions are necessary. People really do make harmful choices, and loving someone doesn’t mean pretending that harmful behavior is acceptable. Strawberry certainly doesn’t accept her father’s beliefs. She questions him. She confronts him. She speaks truth to him.

Loving someone doesn’t require us to pretend that what they are doing is right.

But labels can also prevent us from seeing the person behind them.

Jack sees the oilman.

Rhubarb sees a rat.

Neither label tells the whole story.

And perhaps that gives us another way to think about Jesus’ command to love our enemies. Loving an enemy doesn’t necessarily mean agreeing with that person, trusting that person, or pretending that our differences don’t matter.

It means refusing to let hatred decide how we will act.

Peter could help.

Barnabas could help.

So they did.

Most of us will never need to send snowplows into a blizzard or rescue a mouse from danger. Our opportunities will probably be much smaller: showing kindness to someone who has been unkind, helping someone we don’t particularly like, refusing to join in when others ridicule someone, forgiving an offense, or simply taking the time to discover whether the person we’ve labeled an enemy really deserves that label.

Sometimes loving our enemies begins with something very simple:

Choosing to do good anyway.