In the last lesson I mentioned how my house’s addition taught me that it’s hard to see the good when you’re drowning (a lesson I would’ve preferred being told than experiencing firsthand). It also taught me another very important lesson: I know there is a God because there is a devil, and wow is he good at what he does. If there was an annual review, he would be given: “Exceeds expectations.” During this build he was on fire (play on words intended). During these three years for our build, I faced the worst year, the worst fall, and the worst month of my life (not to brag). I also had a competition for the worst week and day of my life. It was quite the competition with many options being close to the winner. The hardest part was for every step forward something bad happened. That’s not an exaggeration or me being negative. In fact, half way through the project when we finished something I’d ask, “Any guesses what will go wrong now?” and there was always something. For instance, the one day something was finished and we found someone had backed into the side of my man-van (aka minivan) leaving a solid trailer hitch dent that’s still there. Another day something was finished and an angry, drunk driving, schizophrenic smashed the front of our parked minivan. Another day we had something get done and there was a leak. Another day something got done and there was another leak. Another day something got done and there was another leak… and another and another. We ended up with 15 drywall repairs from leaks with 3 of those being spots needing to be repaired up to four times because we thought they were fixed, but weren’t. What’s almost funny is the devil’s biggest weapon against us in this build was water.
The craziest situation was we ordered a wooden fireplace mantle, and we were told it would be two months. Eight months later (our normal timeline experience) we received an email saying the mantle was finally almost done; it just needed two days to cure. They would email us to determine pickup. Two days later we got something else done on the house and then I received an email saying there was a fire at the shop and everything was destroyed including our mantle. What were the odds? Pretty good for us. Our curse followed everyone who worked for us minus the couple people from my church we hired like the electrician. Everyone else said something like “I’ve never had things go so wrong on a project before.” That was fun.
The most impressive demonstration of the devil’s skill was during the period where we were working on the upstairs bedroom areas, which left us sleeping on the floor in the basement for seven months. The work should’ve been a month, but the contractor I hired was showing up once a week and after three months I hired another person to help him who was doing me a favor, but was only able to do three times a week. I was naturally doing as much as I could, but with work there wasn’t a lot of free time for me to do much. During that period, there was a four month stint where I was skipping church to work on the house. Church is the highlight of my week, which is strange to say because when I was younger if you told me church would be the highlight of my week, I’d laugh… or cry: “That’ll be my highlight? Oh man; how bad is life going to be?” Fortunately, I found a church that is my perfect fit. The worship music is fantastic and the pastor is brilliant. My wife and I officially joined the church in 2018, but I’ve known the pastor since 1999 and even had him as a professor for a class during my Masters of Theology. For whatever reason, when I joined the church, I felt that God wanted me to encourage the pastor, so every week minus COVID times I was looking for a way to encourage him. Fortunately, finding compliments was easy because he’s such a talented speaker and he has a wonderful warmth about him. During my four months away, I obviously wasn’t complimenting him because I wasn’t there, but at a certain point I started wondering if he even noticed; did he even care? I knew he had a church of 300-400 people, so I got that he was busy, but that thought was still festering: Do I matter?
The bigger issue was the pastor regularly talked about having what he called God taps where God would put it on his heart to talk to someone or do something. I get that. That’s why I had been complimenting him. But this meant by the pastor not reaching out to me, God hadn’t told him to reach out to me, so now it was as if God Himself had forgotten me; now that… hurt. As a Christian you’re told to pray for things, so I prayed about it and nothing. For months… nothing. Thankfully, with a little prodding from my wife the pastor and I ended up talking and it turned out while I was going through the worst time of my life, he was going through the worst time in his. When he was most in need of encouragement, the very person God had told to be encouraging, had been taken out of the equation, but that’s how good the devil is. He coordinated that time to be the absolute worst for both of us. Fortunately, when we talked it was incredibly healing and I made sure I started prioritizing church because I needed it.
The great thing is shortly after that I was told you can’t be true friends with someone until you’ve gone through a conflict together. This is what we now had – a real friendship. Had I listened to that stupid voice in my head that told me to jab at him, I would’ve been just another disappointing person in his life. Instead, I proved how safe I could be for him. I could be more than just encouraging words; I could be a good person. Similarly, the pastor proved he was a safe person. After all, he could’ve been angry at me: Where were you when I needed you? Instead we both approached the situation with kindness. This proved we had a real friendship. The devil might be good at what he does, but he doesn’t have to win.
What’s interesting is just like God can lead us to doing things that are about love and encouragement (i.e. God taps), the devil can also lead us to do things, but his goal is to hurt and discourage. I’m not sure where the line is between someone being a jerk versus the jerkiness being influenced by the devil, but the end result is the same – pain. For instance, if we look at the story of Job in the Bible, he was really rich and had a lot of kids, but within minutes he lost all of it; his wealth was stolen and all of his kids were killed in a freak accident – that’s worse than any day I’ve had. Shortly after that he became sick and was covered in painful boils. In the story, we’re told this was the devil’s doing in this strange opening to the book where the devil asks if he can prove to God that Job isn’t as righteous as God wants to think. God for some reason accepts the challenge in this weird MGM sports betting type scenario. My question is did the devil think he could outsmart God or did he just want a chance to screw with someone?
What’s fascinating to me is the only thing the devil doesn’t attack in the story of Job is the wife. He leaves her alone. Why? Because he wanted her to be herself. Why? Because we’re told that in her grief she tells Job, her husband, to curse God and die. She encouraged him to commit suicide after telling God off. She wasn’t the nicest wife. If I could diagnose her, I’d say she has the evil witch syndrome, but that’s not a real label (yet). Did the devil influence her to say that or did he just know that she would say that because she was a jerk being a jerk? We can only guess.
The bottom line is the devil can use us to do his bidding, to hurt and discourage. Sometimes this is with those closest to us like a spouse or friend and other times it’s about bringing the world down as a whole. Fortunately, as the Bible teaches, God can use all things for His glory. The devil might be good at what he does, but it doesn’t mean he has to win, and in the long run we know he will end up the greatest loser of them all, so it makes sense for us to pick the winning team.
This week may you consider how you can protect yourself from being the devil’s tool for hurt and discouragement.
Rev. Chad David, ChadDavid.ca, learning to love dumb people (like me)
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