Here is the story Je-Kon shared in his message last Sunday.
A woman shared an interesting lesson that her family had experienced:
Not long after we had started to attend Church, we ran across this verse during a family devotion:
“If your enemies are hungry, feed them.” (Romans 12:20).
Our sons, 7 and 10 at the time, were especially puzzled.
“Why should we feed our enemies?” they wondered.
My husband and I wondered too. The only answer my husband could think of was, “We’re supposed to because God says so.”
Yet it did not take long until we learned why.
At that time our younger son Luke came home from school complaining day after day about a classmate who sat behind him. He said,
“Kyle keeps jabbing me, when Miss Smith isn’t looking. One of these days when we are out on the play ground, I’m going to jab him back.”
Honestly I was ready to go down to the school and jab Kyle myself. Obviously the boy was a brat. Besides, why wasn’t Miss Smith doing a better job with her kids? I’d better give her an oral jab, too, at the same time!
I was fuming over this injustice to Luke until his brother spoke up:
“Maybe he should feed his enemy.”
The three of us were startled at this suggestion. None of us was sure about this enemy business. It didn’t seem that an enemy would be in the 5th grade. An enemy was someone who was way off.
The three of us looked at my husband. But the only answer he could offer was the same one he had given before:
“I guess we should because God says so.”
“Well,” I asked Luke, “do you know what Kyle likes to eat? If you’re going to feed him, you may get something he likes.”
“Jelly beans!” he almost shouted, “Kyle just loves jelly beans.”
So we went out and bought a bag of jelly beans for Luke to take to school the next day. We prayed about Luke’s enemy and about the jelly beans.
Now Luke was going to simply turn around and deposit the bag on his enemy’s desk, when he would be jabbed. We would see whether or not this enemy feeding worked.
The next afternoon, the boys rushed home from the school bus, and Luke called ahead,
“It worked. Mum! It worked.”
I wanted the details: “What did Kyle do? What did he say?”
“He was so surprised he didn’t say anything. He just took the jelly beans. But he didn’t jab me the rest of the day!”
In time, Luke and Kyle became the best of friends, all because of a little bag of jelly beans.
Both of our sons subsequently became missionaries on foreign lands. Their way of showing friendship with any enemies of the faith was to invite the inhabitants of those countries into their own homes to share food with them around their own tables. It seems enemies are always hungry. Maybe that is why Jesus said to feed them.
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