It’s easy to love people who love you back. It’s easy to love when people are kind, grateful, or pleasant to be around. But if you want to make the world more like heaven, you have to go deeper than that. You have to learn to love when it’s hard.

Jesus said, “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?... But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:46–48).

Heaven begins to spread when love reaches people who least deserve it—and when it flows through people who least feel capable of giving it.

And here’s the beautiful secret: when you love people who are hard to love, it doesn’t just change them. It changes you.

The Neighbor Who Changed Both Sides of the Fence

Several years ago, a man named Mike lived next door to a neighbor who seemed determined to make his life miserable. She called the city about his trash cans, complained about his dog, even reported him for parking too close to her driveway.

Mike and his wife decided to take Jesus’ words literally. Every month, they did one small act of kindness—bringing her cookies, mowing her front yard when they did theirs, offering to help when her car battery died. She barely acknowledged them.

But one winter morning, they found her car wouldn’t start. They gave her a ride to the grocery store and carried her bags in. That simple act opened a door. Over the next few months, she started waving when she saw them. Later, she confessed she’d been angry and lonely ever since her husband died.

Years later, Mike said, “She softened—but so did I. I realized I wasn’t just trying to love my neighbor; God was teaching me patience, humility, and compassion.”

Love changed both sides of the fence.

The Coach and the Angry Teen

A high school football coach named Bill McCartney (who would later start Promise Keepers) once told a story about a player who constantly mouthed off. This young man had attitude, anger, and a chip on his shoulder the size of a mountain. Most coaches would’ve benched him. But Coach McCartney kept speaking life over him.

He’d tell him, “You’re better than this. God made you for more.” He prayed for him every day. Over time, the boy’s heart began to soften. One night after practice, that young man asked why Coach kept giving him second chances. Bill said, “Because that’s what God did for me.”

Years later, the young man came to faith and said, “I didn’t believe in God until I saw Him in my coach.”

Love that persists in the face of defiance is one of the most powerful forces on earth. It changes hearts because it reflects heaven’s patience.

Corrie ten Boom: Loving the Unforgivable

No story illustrates this better than Corrie ten Boom’s.

After surviving Ravensbrück concentration camp, she traveled Europe preaching about forgiveness. One night in Germany, after a service, a man approached her—one of the former guards from the camp where her sister had died.

“Fraulein,” he said, “I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did. But I would like to hear it from your lips as well. Will you forgive me?”

Corrie froze. Anger surged through her. She remembered her sister’s frail body, the mocking soldiers, the unspeakable suffering. She silently prayed, Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your forgiveness.

And as she reached out her hand, she felt a rush of warmth, “a current,” she said, “that seemed to pass from me to him.”

“I forgive you, brother,” she whispered.

Later she said, “For a long moment, we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.”

That’s what heaven looks like on earth.

Tone matters

Proverbs counsels that when you go, you do well to pay attention to one more thing: the tone of your voice. “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” Proverbs 15:1 (NIV) Paul instructed, “Let your gentleness be evident to all.” Philippians 4:5a (NIV)

They have done research on this. What they have found is that doctors don’t get sued because they make mistakes. All doctors make mistakes, but all doctors don’t get sued. I have a friend who lost a baby because of a mistake by the doctor. They didn’t sue. Why not? Why doesn’t anyone not sue a doctor who makes a mistake?

Doctors get sued because of the tone of their voice. To test this. Psychologist Nalini Ambady listened to recordings of surgeons interacting with their patients. For each surgeon, she picked two patient conversations. Then, from each conversation, she selected two ten-second clips of the doctor talking, so her slice was a total of forty seconds. Finally, she garbled the recordings so you could not recognize individual words, but you can still discern the tone of voice. Using that slice—and that slice alone—Ambady did her analysis. She had judges rate the slices of garbled speech for such qualities as warmth, hostility, dominance, and anxiousness, and she found that by using only those ratings, she could predict which surgeons got sued and which ones didn’t.[1]

Tone matters. 

Start-up tone is especially important. The tone you use as you start the conversation will determine its outcome—with 96% accuracy. “The research shows that if your discussion begins with a harsh startup, it will inevitably end on a negative note, even if there are a lot of attempts to “make nice” in between. Statistics tell the story: 96 percent of the time you can predict the outcome of a conversation based on the first three minutes of the fifteen-minute interaction! A harsh startup simply dooms you to failure.”[2]