The poor man and the oppressor have this in common:  The LORD gives sight to the eyes of both (Proverbs 29:13).

I was trained to hate people from Willard, Ohio.  They were supposed to be the most dirty, distempered, dastardly people known to mankind.  They were cheaters; they never played according to the rules.  And if they ever got you down, they would kick you and spit on you and mock you while you were on the ground.  It was more than a sports rivalry between schools (though this was supposedly the starting point for the tensions between the towns).  It was cosmic conflict:  good versus evil, right versus wrong.  And I came to believe that Willard was just plain wicked.

Then I finally met some people from Willard.

At first I was resistant to them, very guarded, preoccupied by the crimson W's on their letter-jackets.  But as I listened to them talk, I realized that they actually had a lot of similarities to me -- and other people from Shelby (my hometown), too.  They liked a lot of the same professional sports teams that I liked; they listened to a lot of the same music that I listened to; they even went to churches that sounded pretty similar to my own church in Shelby.  And as we got to know each other better, I started to realize that I actually liked these people from Willard.  They weren't just all about cheap-shots in football, biting and scratching at the bottom of the football pile-up.  They weren't just trash-talkers and wannabe gangstas.  They were regular people with a worldview surprisingly similar to my own.

Eventually, I came to realize that we're all just people.  We've got our strengths; we've got our weaknesses.  We're all made in the image of God, yet we've all been tainted by the Fall, too -- thus, we've all got our issues.  And while it feels kind of convenient to demonize and dichotomize, it's almost never that straightforward.  Each side of a conflict has its own set of stories to justify their opinion.  Even the "bad guys" -- the presumed oppressors and villains -- are just seeing things through their own set of God-given eyes.

Willard people, at least, aren't actually wicked.  They're just from Willard.