Stephen White, writing for Red Letter Christians:

Us versus them. It is one of the oldest sentences the human heart knows how to say, older than language, certainly older than scripture. Us is the circle drawn warm and close, the people whose grief is our grief, whose children we would run into a burning house to save. Them is everyone on the far side, the ones we have decided, somewhere below conscious thought, we are allowed not to love…

There is us. There is them. Everybody knows that. And then a man came walking out of Galilee, dust on his feet, and said the single strangest thing anyone had ever said about it, a thing so strange that two thousand years later we still have not really begun to believe he meant it.

He said: Love your enemies.

Removing the us-versus-them mentality from my worldview is something I am constantly working on, because there’s no room for it in the heart of someone who has compassion for the world. If I truly believe – as I claim – to see everybody I come into contact with as a full person deserving of the same dignity, consideration, and respect that I desire for myself and my loved ones, then I can’t really see anyone else as “other.”

We are all people with feelings, desires, dreams, needs, and full inner lives, and we each deserve to be treated as such. We each deserve to have our needs met. My faith teaches me that every human being is created in the image of God, and it’s my job to recognize that divine reflection in every person I encounter, whether they’re similar to me or not.

I highly recommend reading White’s piece in full because it beautifully illustrates how Jesus serves as an example of what loving our enemies and crossing us-versus-them lines looks like, as well as how we can follow his example today. Making the world a better place starts with empathy, and it requires that we tear down the walls we’ve built in our heads between ourselves and those we don’t see as part of our in-group.

There is no them, only us.