Justified Hatred?

A friend of mine is being sued by a former landlord, months after the fact, over something rather silly. As we talked about it, she said that she'd been trying to pray the right things, but in truth, what she really prayed for was that the guy would have a heart attack or stroke so that he wouldn't show up to court.

I can relate.

Don't we all have jerks in our lives who really, we can justify the reasons for hating them? People we know we're supposed to love anyway, people we're supposed to show kindness to, even though we want to kick them in the rear end?

Let's be honest-there are times when we'd really like God to just reach out and smite our enemies. Why can't God rain sulfur down on Bin Laden and his buddies? Surely He finds their brand of religious zeal utterly distasteful. Of course, I'd imagine that He finds a lot of other things in this world distasteful as well.

So how do we reconcile this with the command Jesus gave to love our enemies? It would be easy enough to brush it off, if only didn't give it four times.

I still don't know what that means or how to do that. But that's the whole purpose of prayer, isn't it? To keep praying, to let the Holy Spirit work in our hearts, and help us figure out a way to be able to say, "Forgive them Father, they don't know what they're doing."