his hand still gripping the gun. The coroner's report declared that anger had caused the
heart failure."
When Jesus said: "Love your enemies", He was also telling us how to improve our
looks. I know women-and so do you-whose faces have been wrinkled and hardened by
hate and disfigured by resentment. All the beauty treatments in Christendom won't
improve their looks half so much as would a heart full of forgiveness, tenderness, and
love.
Hatred destroys our ability to enjoy even our food. The Bible puts it this way "Better is a
dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith."
Wouldn't our enemies rub their hands with glee if they knew that our hate for them was
exhausting us, making us tired and nervous, ruining our looks, giving us heart trouble,
and probably shortening our lives?
Even if we can't love our enemies, let's at least love ourselves. Let's love ourselves so
much that we won't permit our enemies to control our happiness, our health and our
looks. As Shakespeare put it:
Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot
That it do singe yourself.
When Jesus said that we should forgive our enemies "seventy times seven", He was
also preaching sound business. For example, I have before me as I write a letter I
received from George Rona, Fradegata'n 24, Uppsala, Sweden. For years, George
Rona was an attorney in Vienna; but during the Second World War, he fled to Sweden.
He had no money, needed work badly. Since he could speak and write several
languages, he hoped to get a position as correspondent for some firm engaged in
importing or exporting. Most of the firms replied that they had no need of such services
because of the war, but they would keep his name on file ... and so on. One man,
however, wrote George Rona a letter saying: "What you imagine about my business is
not true. You are both wrong and foolish. I do not need any correspondent. Even if I did
need one, I wouldn't hire you because you can't even write good Swedish. Your letter is
full of mistakes."
When George Rona read that letter, he was as mad as Donald Duck. What did this
Swede mean by telling him he couldn't write the language! Why, the letter that this
Swede himself had written was full of mistakes! So George Rona wrote a letter that was
calculated to burn this man up. Then he paused. He said to himself: "Wait a minute,
now. How do I know this man isn't right? I have studied Swedish, but it's not my native
language, so maybe I do make mistakes I don't know anything about. If I do, then I
certainly have to study harder if I ever hope to get a job. This man has possibly done me
a favour, even though he didn't mean to. The mere fact that he expressed himself in
disagreeable terms doesn't alter my debt to him. Therefore, I am going to write him and
thank him for what he has done."
So George Rona tore up the scorching letter he had already written, and wrote another
that said: "It was kind of you to go to the trouble of writing to me, especially when you do
not need a correspondent. I am sorry I was mistaken about your firm. The reason that I
wrote you was that I made inquiry and your name was given me as a leader in your
field. I did not know I had made grammatical errors in my letter. I am sorry and ashamed
of myself. I will now apply myself more diligently to the study of the Swedish language
and try to correct my mistakes. I want to thank you for helping me get started on the
road to self-improvement."