What does it mean to truly love like Christ? In this episode of Born to be a Butterfly, Nina Pajonas shares a powerful revelation: our ability to love cannot depend on someone else’s ability to love us. Drawing from Scripture and personal testimony, Nina unpacks the difference between human love and Agape love—the kind of selfless, sacrificial love that heals wounds, restores hope, and transforms lives.

You’ll hear how prayer protects us from bitterness, why vindictiveness is a trap of the enemy, and how to see even those who hurt us as children of God. This message will challenge and encourage you to rise above offense and reflect Christ’s love in the darkest moments.

Welcome to Born to be a Butterfly, where we embrace healing and growth in Christ so that we can experience true transformation. My name is Nina Pajonas, and I pray that today’s episode ministers to you.

One of the most profound revelations I’ve had as a Christian is this: My ability to love someone cannot be based on their ability to love me. Even though I’ve never put it into words before, it is the way I have tried to live my life.

I have tried, to the best of my ability, to love others. There are times that it’s been hard, especially when people have hurt me deeply, but I do notice that after my anger dissipates, my default setting is love. I want to believe that things will be better. I want to believe they’ll do better.

There is a difference between human love and holy love. Human love is very superficial. The purest of love is Agape love. It is the way God loves us. Its depth is divine, and its power can not be measured. Agape love heals wounds, changes hearts, and transforms lives. It is selfless and sacrificial. It is love at its purest, and it allows us to love somebody, even when they don’t love us.

That’s the way that we’re called to love as children of Christ, as children of the Most High God. We are called to love people who hate us, who mock our faith, who persecute us, and who disrespect our God. We don’t have to love what they’re doing, but we’re called to love them.

When we love someone in that way, it allows us to pray for them, and that opens our hearts to compassion. Please hear me when I say this: If we don’t pray for our enemies, we will become part of the enemy’s army — We will be consumed by bitterness, rage, and the need for retribution. Praying helps us as much as it helps them because it prevents their darkness from becoming ours.

Matthew 5:46–47 (ESV)

“If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?”

Jesus calls us to higher ground: to love those the world would write off.

The truth of the matter is, others cannot love you if they don’t first love themselves. If they hate themselves or dislike their lives. If they are filled with misery, it’s going to spill out on you. Whether they intend to or not, and whether you like it or not, it will happen.

If they don’t know the Lord, if they’re not connected to Christ, who is the source of love, it will be very easy for them to default to hate. Jesus is the light, and without the light, the darkness will overcome them.

Matthew 6:22-23

22 The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. 23 But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!

In this verse, Jesus is explaining that the eye is a lamp for the body. It is supposed to signify someone’s spiritual and emotional eyesight, which affects how they see the world. If their eyes are unhealthy, it's because they don’t know Our Great Physician, Jesus Christ! And that means their heart, mind, and soul are infected with spiritual sickness. They won’t have eyes to see the light — to see the good in anything! Darkness will blind them, and they will have hearts filled with hate.

However, we must always remember that they are a child of God and that they have a soul. They deserve to know their creator and to experience His love. As children of the Most High God, we all have intrinsic value because we are His; we are valuable. Before we do anything in our lives, or with our lives, we are His children.

We are called to love people at their darkest moments, at their lowest moments. That’s literally what God does with us. When Jesus was on the cross, what did He say to God the Father? Jesus said, “Father, forgive them. For they know not what they do.”

Our Messiah showed us mercy as we were murdering Him. He showed us compassion even as we killed Him.

And that should remind us of a very important fact. We are all sinners who fall short of the glory of God.

We are followers of Christ, and we still don’t get it right. We sin every day in some small way, whether it’s by thought or deed. Do we not? We walk with our Savior and have the Holy Spirit living inside of us, and we still sin!

If they don’t know Him at all, we can’t be surprised if they are living in darkness. They have not been reborn in Christ yet! They are lost, they haven’t yet been found! Their eyes haven’t been opened, their ears don’t hear! Whether it’s because they refuse to, or they are not able to, or they are in too much pain. We don’t know the reason; we just know they haven’t been saved.

What I can say is that they need love more than ever. They need more compassion, more understanding, more prayers. They need hope. They need a bright light in the dark places they find themselves in, as do we. We can lose our light as quickly as we found it if we don’t remember where our help comes from.

So many people wrote me off when I was drinking myself to death, but God didn’t. He left the 99, came, and got me. That’s what love looks like. It looks like the Lord leaving 99 of His children to rescue you. You are only one person, as am I, but in the Lord’s eyes, every child is equally important. We mean the world to Him.

There is a message God put on my heart a while ago. There are messages that I just sit on; I don’t immediately turn them into episodes because I wait until the Lord tells me to release them. God gives me words all the time, and the word He gave me months ago was about vindictiveness, so I’m going to speak on that as well today because it’s relevant.

Earlier this year, I was sad and angry about a particular situation, so I brought it to my Heavenly Father. I told Him, “Father, I’m not perfect, and they’re not perfect, but I loved them to the best of my ability.”

The truth is, the whole situation wouldn’t have hurt as much as it did if I didn’t love them. The amount of grief or pain we feel about the demise of relationships is directly proportionate to the depth of our love for the people involved.

Immediately, the Lord impressed upon me that they were His children, too. I knew God was meeting me in my pain, but I also felt that He was telling me that He had to handle it.

As I reflected on that response, an understanding dawned on me. No one but Jesus is righteous enough to decide what their punishment should be. We are all sinners. Our Lord is righteous, holy, and pure. He is the spotless lamb. Jesus gets to dispense justice because He is our Savior, He is sovereign, and we are His children.

I’m going to use an analogy to make my point. Is it up to us to walk up to a parent in the supermarket, whose toddler is misbehaving and screaming? Do we get to take matters into our own hands, walk up to the kid, and put them in a time-out? Could you imagine doing that? That wouldn’t work out well at all because we have no say over somebody else’s child.

I’ve come to realize that it’s the same way with God. We must go to Him when a brother or sister in Christ hurts us. And the very first thing we need to do is ask for the Lord’s help in forgiving them. Then, we ask Him to heal our worldly wounds, while we make a concerted effort to keep our hearts, souls, and minds focused on the kingdom so that we don’t fall victim to the enemy’s schemes.

Trust me when I tell you that the evil one is always at work in such situations. It doesn’t matter if he didn’t orchestrate it; that won’t stop Satan from taking advantage of it.

We must “Let Go and Let God.” He will decide what happens to them as a consequence. Now, don’t get me wrong, the Lord might tell you that you need to leave that friendship or relationship. That could happen. He knows His children and whether or not they are spiritually healthy enough to stay connected to you.

Oftentimes, we won’t know what happened as a result of someone else’s behavior. We might be long gone by the time justice from Jesus comes to pass, but again, it’s none of our business. Those are His children, and parents discipline their own kids. It’s His decision, and we have no say in it.

There is no victory in vindictiveness. It’s not our job to get them back. God doesn’t want us to get our hands dirty. If we stoop to their spiritual level, it won't please the Lord, because that means He has multiple children being problematic. Besides, when we reciprocate in kind, we wind up becoming the very thing that we can’t stand. By lowering our standards of behavior, we put ourselves in a dangerous place spiritually, emotionally, and mentally because once we cross a line, we are at risk of repeating it.

We can’t be arrogant and assume that we are so spiritually strong that we’ll bounce back from engaging in evil behavior. We don’t know if we’ll recover quickly from revenge or if it will linger in our souls. We can easily find ourselves enjoying the sense of power we’ve gained and the retribution we've achieved. Make no mistake, that can happen when we allow ourselves to be fueled by fury instead of faith.

We must not willingly and knowingly touch those dark places again, because that’s what we got saved from. We must never venture into the darkness with such self-assurance that we’ll find our way back to the light.

One of the most powerful things that I heard in a 12-step meeting was from a woman, who said, “I know I have another drink in me, but I don’t know if I have another recovery.”

In essence, what she was saying was that she knew she could visit that place again, but she didn’t know if she’d make it back to the rooms. She knew there was a good chance she could die out there.

The same thing goes for us as Christians. We once were dead, but now we are alive in Christ. We must never gamble with God’s grace. If we return to our old life and former ways, there is no guarantee that the devil won’t destroy us while we are there.

1 Peter 5:8

Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.

Before we seek revenge, we have to say to ourselves, “Am I going to come back to Christ after this? Isn’t this what He saved me from? I’m going backwards now. I’m supposed to seek transformation through the Holy Trinity, but now I’m conforming to the ways of society. Once again.

It’s not worth compromising your soul, and it’s definitely not worth losing your soul.

So when I say my ability to love someone cannot be based on their ability to love me, I mean it wholeheartedly. We must be the love we want to see in the world. That means sharing the love of the Lord—the kind of love that forgives when it doesn’t make sense, that hopes when history says otherwise, and that trusts Jesus to handle the judgment of sin.

Love that is rooted in Christ will always bloom beautifully, even in the harshest environment. In Him, we find true victory, not in vindictiveness, but in salvation.

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Ready to dive deeper into healing and transformation? Get my book, From Broken to Butterfly, on Amazon today!

If you have any questions or want to connect, send me a DM on Instagram at Born To Be A Butterfly or email me at ninapajonas@gmail.com.

Remember, the Lord can turn your wounds into wings—you were Born to be a Butterfly!