Slap the Man Behind the Curtain

A number of times, I’ve written about the weird “coincidences” that keep happening when I go to church. Here is tonight’s.

On Tuesday, I had to sit through a sales pitch. I wrote about this already.The salesperson was the daughter of someone my dad knows. I wouldn’t call this man a friend. He’s in real estate, and he tries to get my father to invest in things that I think are extremely ill-advised. I can’t warm up to people who hawk risky investments to senior citizens, especially when they go after my family.

The daughter contacted my dad last week, and she asked if she could do a sales presentation. He referred her to me. All she would tell me was that she sold something related to cooking. I told my dad how much I was not looking forward to the presentation, and derider of Christianity that he is, he said it was my Christian duty. I believe God speaks to people through their parents, so at that point, I let it go and decided to suffer through the pitch. It was very out of character for him to say that, so I figured there had to be a reason it had happened.

It turned out she was selling Cutco knives. I didn’t take any; they’re extremely expensive, and I don’t need them, and the quality doesn’t exactly give me goosebumps. On top of that, I felt that buying from her would be perpetuating a relationship in which her family had a pattern of taking advantage of mine. Breaking out of destructive patterns is a big part of Christianity. Maybe I was overly wary, but the whole thing put me on edge.

Let’s move to tonight. The pastor was talking about living life on the offensive. Somehow, he wandered off into a story about a young acquaintance of his who had a new job. And guess what that job was? Selling kitchen knives. No company was mentioned, but obviously, this kid is a Cutco rep. The big differences in our stories are that the kid in the pastor’s story cut himself badly while demonstrating the product, and that the pastor bought some stuff. Okay, maybe he’s a better Christian than I am. On the other hand, I doubt the kid’s father ever tried to get a high-interest loan from the pastor’s dad, to finance a buy at the top of a real estate bubble.

After church, my payoff was that I had a “coincidence” story for my dad. The more of my testimony he hears, the better off he’ll be. Sooner or later, he’ll crack.

The sermon was excellent. He was talking about the necessity of taking the initiative in life. If you’re on the offense, you design the game, and you force your enemy to react after you strike. I listened to this stuff, and I wondered why I needed to hear it. I wondered what I had been doing wrong THIS time. Generally, when I hear a sermon, I find that it addresses some issue I need to work on.

Here’s the great part. After a while, I came to the conclusion that I was doing okay! I think he was talking about an area of my life where I’m doing pretty well. That came as a relief. After hearing so many sermons in which faults of which I had been unaware had been made clear to me, it was wonderful to hear about things I was doing right. I’ve put in a lot of work. I’ve been on the offensive for years now. I started praying regularly in 2001, and I’ve been moving in God’s direction ever since. Maybe tonight it was time for a little harvesting. A break. A reward.

I think regular prayer is an extremely powerful, life-changing way of taking the initiative. Think about it. Isn’t most prayer reactive? You do it as a defensive measure. For example, you get a disease. Your child has an accident. Your husband gets fired. So you start to pray. “Please fix this problem.” Then the problem goes away, maybe, and so does the praying. Or the problem overcomes you, and you stop praying, because you figure there is no longer any point. When you live that way, who decides when you pray and when you go to church and when you behave? Satan. Am I wrong? You’re not making the rules or choosing the playing field. He is. But if you get up every morning, even when things are going great, and you pray, you’re eating into his profits. Hammering holes in his front lines. And he can’t predict it. He doesn’t know the future. He can’t see your punches coming. He has to react as best he can, and he loses over and over, because he is weaker than we are.

I thought about this tonight during church. I’m always mad because I was born into a world where hostile spirits have been attacking my kind since we were first created. It’s like living in a tank full of invisible sharks. They have been harming me all my life. Spoiling my dreams. Ruining my relationships. Taking money from me. Injuring me. They do the same things to you. The Bible refers to these miserable beings as “destroyers” and “devourers.” If you’re a Christian, surely you’ve wished you could have five minutes alone with one, in a locked room, with a blow torch and a broken beer bottle. Well, you can. Sort of. If you take the initiative, you become THEIR destroyer and devourer. You spoil THEIR dreams. You make them suffer. You ruin their plans and humiliate them. You wreck and take away the things that give them satisfaction. And it’s not a symmetrical situation. They can never break even, because in the end, they’re going to be condemned and disassembled before the cheering people they used to torment.

That’s inspiring. I can get excited about that. Revenge is wrong, when it’s directed at human beings. When it’s directed at principalities and powers, it’s far from wrong. It’s our purpose. It’s our duty. We are supposed to do what is right, and doing right is what makes them suffer. We are not expected to forgive them. We are not expected to turn the other cheek. It’s open season. When you pray or you give money to charity or the church, or you do things to help other people, you are like a festering blight in Satan’s garden. I never realized this until today. We CAN have vengeance. We can be to Satan what he has always been to us.

That’s really wonderful. When I do good, I eventually run out of steam. I have a limited amount of love to drive me. But anger…that never runs out. I have seen and experienced too much suffering to ever get tired of punishing the most guilty parties. Looking at it this way, I find it much easier to forgive human beings. If I can get at a vicious and cowardly supernatural being by forgiving a person, I’m happy to make the exchange. For as long as I have been aware that these creatures existed, I have wanted a way to cause them despair and make their efforts come to nothing. I didn’t fully understand that I was already doing these things.

The knife thing really weirded me out. I hope things like that keep happening to me for the rest of my life.