God and Blindspots

Jesus said that we should love our enemies. After all if you love only those who love you how are you any different from those who are far from God?

Seems to me that loving people is a bit like the concentric rings of a target. Where someone comes into our circles could possibly be measured by what we might be willing to do to help them. Those living in our inner most ring are those closest to us who like us and love us and we find it generally easy to love, family and friends. In my case this includes my cats. We might be willing to sacrifice our primary resources for these people. Parents often help sacrificially for their children. Almost as often grown children might sacrifice to help their parents.

The next ring might be those we encounter in our normal circuit of life, i.e. church, work, neighborhood, etc. In contrast to those in the inner circle who "like us", sometimes those in this circle might be classified as people that ARE "like us". We might be willing to dip into our reserves in order to help someone like this.

Further out we might find people not that much like us but who might be in genuine and immediate need. As with the last ring our normal human compassion might draw us to reach into our reserves to help them.

There seems to be another ring out near the perimeter. These are people in our blindspots. Depending on our values and biases these people may be business people, government workers, people on welfare, lazy people, immigrants, atheists, Muslims, liberals, conservatives, criminals. I was taken to the woodshed by God recently on this issue. Ouch. Really, would we be willing to extend our resources to help anyone in our blindspot, if we could figure out what our blindspots are?

I'm not sure whether the ring of people who don't like me and would do me harm if an opportunity presented itself is still further out beyond my blindspot ring or not. I suspect so. Would I be willing to spend any resources here?

The greatness of Jesus' love is that that He didn't love out of His reserves and He didn't love just those closest to Him. He loved sacrificially right out to the last ring of those who did Him great harm. I'm not there yet but if we are to grow into Christlikness, how and where we extend ourselves might be a good metric.