“We are not unaware of his schemes...”

When I came back to the Lord in the late 1980’s, I had a couple of “conditions.” First, I didn’t want to go around telling people how Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons really weren’t Christians. Second, I didn’t want to know anything about the end of the world, and in particular, the devil.

Funny… God didn’t honor any of my conditions. One of the first books I read shortly thereafter was Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth. I also ended up teaching a class at church about the Jehovah Witnesses and their beliefs, but that’s another story.

But about the “devil” part…

Now, I’m not the type of Christian that sees a devil behind a hangnail, but at this time in my life, a series of events occurred that was hard to chalk up to coincidence. First of all I needed to move from where I was living into a condo I’d been renting out. My tenant left owing me 3 months rent and an abandoned Volkswagen bus in the garage (minus the engine, which he had apparently tried to rebuild on the living room rug… as evidenced by the large grease stain).

On top of this, going from sharing rent with a roommate to paying the entire amount myself was a financial burden in itself, but then, the company I was working for laid off our entire customer service department to relocate it at the corporate headquarters in Louisiana. Soon afterwards, the transmission on my car went out. I couldn’t get a job without a car and I couldn’t get a car without a job. I felt stuck.

But the clincher was a girl I’d been interested in. Despite having mutual feeling for one another, she had a some issues she was dealing with, so we’d decided to just be friends for the time being. (Although that didn’t diminish my feelings for her.) But soon afterwards, she approached me at a gathering we both happened to be at and began telling me how she could see herself married to me, having children with me and being happy… and I thought to myself: “Yes! See’s finally seeing what I’ve being seeing for months now!”

Then she proceeded to tell me that she had been dating “George” and that she and “George” were moving in together, and that she wanted me to know because she really did care about me.

You can imagine my drive home that night. About halfway there, I was about as low as you could get, and I begin telling God that if this is the life he had for me, that I was better off without him. I started to say that if Satan really wanted me that bad, he could just have me…

But I stopped short of saying the words. It was as if the Holy Spirit rose up in me and I suddenly shut my mouth. Even as low as I was, I recognized that it was Satan, not God, who was orchestrating all of this. It seems I wasn’t going to be able to ignore him, after all.

Incidentally, “George” turned out to be obsessive, possessive, and physically abusive. She eventually moved out and got a restraining order against him.