We cross the room, but in the doorway, Haymitch's voice stops us. "Katniss, when you're in the arena," he begins. Then he pauses. He's scowling in a way that makes me sure I've already disappointed him.

"What?" I ask defensively.

"You just remember who the enemy is," Haymitch tells me.

— "Catching Fire" 260

In a story like "The Hunger Games,"a reminder like Haymitch’s hardly feels necessary, not in a world that uses fear and death to create enemies of everyone. Yet at the end of the second book, separated from the one person she can trust and attacked by those who called themselves her allies, Katniss pauses when faced with a woman who wouldn’t hesitate to end her life, and Haymitch's words resurface. The woman looks like an enemy, even fits the part with razors for teeth. In the moment Katniss hesitates to kill the attacker right in front of her, she hears her mentor’s voice in her head: “remember who the enemy is.” That’s all it takes to turn her arrow away. When the moment ends, Katniss aims upward instead, toward the forces she can’t see: The Capitol.

Even in a world that doesn’t force its children to fight to the death, enough tragedy and animosity exists to make enemies a part of life. They seem easy to pinpoint. Their faces become more pronounced in the backdrop of bombings and chants for death. Religious, cultural, and sexual beliefs have become cause for hatred too. But it’s also in our everyday lives, when a friend makes a careless remark or family fails to offer support that skews our perception. When we’re thrown into the arena of daily life and come face to face with negativity through another person, it’s easy to want to tear them down before they do the same to us.

But the moment we see those people as our enemies, we wipe away a part of their humanity. Pointing fingers at each other only distracts us long enough to allow the destruction and death to continue. To treat one as a monster and another as a victim is to lessen the fact that we’re all broken humans, often struggling to make sense of the world we’ve been born into. Even in Panem, a world that thrives on inequality and the death of innocent people, Katniss recognizes that the people she’s meant to kill – the ones who are supposed to kill her – are merely trying to survive their circumstances.

In reality, the brokenness of her world isn’t too far off from that of our own. It’s true that we’re responsible for the choices we make within our circumstances, but we also have to recognize that we’re only battling the symptom, not the cause, when we rip each other apart. There will be people who make wrong decisions, choosing to play along with the situations that try to pit us against each other. Katniss had to face plenty of those types in the arena, but in one moment of hesitation, Haymitch’s reminder gives her the clarity to “remember who the enemy is.”

We need that reminder too. It’s not always going to be easy. We’re going to face people who not only look like our enemy, but may even welcome the title. Just like Katniss, we have a choice. Where will we let our weapon fly? Even when our opponents stand right in front of us, ready to pick and tear us apart, we need to remember their humanity and aim not at them, but at “the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12). When we do so in the name of Jesus, we won’t be guessing when we say that the odds are certainly in our favor.