Free Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

about the verse in the same chapter saying that we should do good to our enemy, “for in doing so thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head?” Where did Jesus ever see doing good as a form of revenge? I saw the Bible as pretty much slanting upward until it got to Jesus, who forgave even the ones who were killing Him while they were killing Him, and then slanting down again when it got to St. Paul. I was truly moved by the stories of Jesus in the Gospels. I could imagine them. The Nativity in the Gospel of Luke and the Resurrection in the Gospel of John I could just shut my eyes and see. I could imagine everything until I got to the letters of Paul.
    Questions all of a sudden were clanging in my mind like Edgar Allan Poe’s brazen alarum bells. I still believed in the divinity and the teachings of Jesus and was determined to follow my purpose of preaching the Gospel—when I preached, I thought, I would just not mention the parts that gave me trouble—but it got so I couldn’t open a Bible without setting off a great jangling and wrangling of questions that almost deafened me.
    If we are to understand the Bible as literally true, why are we permitted to hate our enemies? If Jesus meant what He said when He said we should love our enemies, how can Christians go to war? Why, since He told us to pray in secret, do we continue to pray in public? Is an insincere or vain public prayer not a violation of the third commandment? And what about our bodies that always seemed to come off so badly in every contest with our soul? Did Jesus put on our flesh so that we might despise it?
    But the worst day of all was when it hit me that Jesus’ own most fervent prayer was refused: “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup
from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” I must have read that verse or heard it a hundred times before without seeing or hearing. Maybe I didn’t want to see it. But then one day I saw it. It just knocked me in the head. This , I thought, is what is meant by “thy will be done” in the Lord’s Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it. It means that your will and God’s will may not be the same. It means there’s a good possibility that you won’t get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer. It means you may be crucified.
    After Jesus’ terrible prayer at Gethsemane, an angel came to Him and gave Him strength, but did not remove the cup.
    Before that time I may have had my doubts about public prayers, but I had listened to them complacently enough, even when they were for the football team. I had prayed my own private prayers complacently enough, asking for things I wanted, even though I knew well already that a lot of things I wanted I was not going to get, no matter how much I prayed for them. (Though I hadn’t got around to thinking about it, I already knew that I had been glad to have some things I had got that I had never thought to want, let alone pray for.)
    But now I was unsure what it would be proper to pray for, or how to pray for it. After you have said “thy will be done,” what more can be said? And where do you find the strength to pray “thy will be done” after you see what it means?
    And what did these questions do to my understanding of all the prayers I had ever heard and prayed? And what did they do to the possibility that I could stand before a congregation— my congregation, who would believe that I knew what I was doing—and pray for favorable weather, a good harvest, the recovery of the sick and the strayed, victory in war? Does prayer change God’s mind? If God’s mind can be changed by the wants and wishes of us mere humans, as if deferring to our better judgment, what is the point of praying to Him at all? And what are we to think when two good people pray for opposite things—as when two devout mothers of