Hate Will Rot Your Soul If You Let It

There is a reason scripture keeps circling back to love. Real love. Hard love. The kind you have to choose on mornings when you wake up already tired. The writers were not naïve. They were not floating around on spiritual cloud nine. They lived under governments that treated human lives like loose change in their pockets.

They knew what it felt like to watch your community pulled apart. They knew how fast fear could spread in a town square. They knew that hate never just stays in the headlines, it slips into households, then into hearts.

They watched how hate spreads.
They watched how hate sticks.
They watched how hate slowly hollows people out.

And if we are honest, most of us have seen it too. Maybe in a relative who used to laugh easily. Maybe in a friend who got swallowed by bitterness. Maybe in ourselves when life knocked us around enough that we started gripping our anger a little tighter than we meant to.

Hate promises to keep you safe. It promises to keep you sharp. It promises to keep you guarded.
Mostly, it just keeps you closed.

When Jesus said love your neighbor, love your enemy, love the stranger, he was not giving out refrigerator magnet theology. He was offering soul preservation. He was saying: do not let what hurt you become what shapes you.

You cannot follow Jesus and treat hate like a souvenir you bring home.
You cannot follow Jesus and treat hate like a coping strategy.
You cannot follow Jesus and treat hate like emotional armor.

Love is not optional. It is how we stay human.

What Hate Does to the Human Mind

Any therapist will tell you that carrying hate is like carrying a bag of wet cement. You do not notice the weight right away, but it hardens inside you. It slows you down. It steals your breath.

It raises your cortisol.
It raises your blood pressure.
It raises the chances you will snap at the wrong person on the wrong day because something inside you finally cracked.

Resentment corrodes.
Anger calcifies.
Hatred takes up the good space where joy used to live.

Hate consumes from the inside long before it ever erupts on the outside.
It consumes the person who holds it long before it ever reaches the person it targets.
It consumes your ability to see the world clearly.

You feel it. In your shoulders. In your sleep. In the way conversations get shorter because your patience got thinner.

Scripture said all this long before psychology confirmed it. Hate is not strength. Hate is slow spiritual poison.

Dr. King Knew the Weight of Hate

This is why Dr. King called hate a burden. Not a choice. A burden. A heavy one.

“Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

He learned that from watching people he loved walk through fire. He learned it from watching how easily trauma can turn into bitterness, and how bitterness can hollow out a movement from the inside.

He learned it the hard way, just like the rest of us.

He said it because hate changes your posture until you are closed off towards the world instead of open to it.

He said it because hate changes your vision until you start recognizing yourself less and less.

He said it because hate tricks you into believing the only way to fight fire is with more flames.

And if we are being real, most of us are not walking around hating individuals.
Most of us hate systems.
Most of us hate cruelty, corruption, and the lies that get dressed up as tradition.
Some of us even hate hate itself.

And Lord knows, that dog will not hunt either.

Because hating hate still distorts you.
Because hating hate still steals your peace.
Because hating hate still tricks you into believing destruction is clarity.

So What Do We Do When the World Is on Fire

You cannot bless bigotry.
You cannot ignore injustice.
You cannot take a deep breath and magically pretend everything is fine.

But you can refuse to let hate be the architect of your soul.
You can refuse to let hate be the thing that defines your ethics.
You can refuse to let hate pull you off course.

The prophets managed that. They held their fire and their integrity at the same time.
Jesus managed that. He turned over tables without turning hateful.
Dr. King managed that. He carried a righteous fire that refined him instead of consuming him.

That is the goal. Not to avoid fire. To burn clean.

Let the fire burn in you, not burn you alive.
Let the fire sharpen you, not harden you.
Let the fire energize you, not exhaust the best parts of you.

Love Is Not Polite. Love Is Powerful.

This is the part people forget. 
Love is not softness. 
Love is not silence. 
Love is not passivity.

Love is the courage to stay human when the world gives you every excuse not to be.
Love is the stubborn refusal to become what you are fighting.
Love is the boldness to confront injustice without letting it corrode your humanity.

Love refuses to be colonized by the forces it resists.
Love refuses to mirror the harm it condemns.
Love refuses to surrender its dignity to anyone who profits from its loss.

You do not fight hate by hating harder.
You fight hate by staying human.
You fight hate by expanding your humanity wider than the wounds you carry.

Or, as Southern wisdom will tell you, you cannot stop a skunk from smelling like a skunk, but you sure do not have to roll around with it.

Let the skunk keep its stink.
Let the haters keep their poison.
Let the systems keep their fear.

You have a world to transform.
You have neighbors to love.
You have joy to reclaim.
You have justice to build.

Not because you are soft.
Not because you are naïve.
Because you refuse to let hate rot your soul.

Love is the better weapon.
And staying human is the real revolution.