#675. Spiritual Attacks.
“Honey, do we own a thick, lightning fast Chihuahua or a freakishly large Black Russian Dwarf hamster?”
That’s what I should have asked my wife that afternoon when we both saw something huge and dark skitter from one side of our garage to the other. It wasn’t that big of a deal, it’s just that things in your periphery vision appear 92 times more terrifying than they really are.
And as much as I hoped it was a goth rabbit that preferred scurrying over hopping, the reality of the situation set in pretty quickly.
We had a rat in our garage and that rat, my friends, was tremendous.
So we bought some glue traps and some poison. Then we started anxiously cleaning the garage. We found the reason the rat came in to the Acuff house in the first place, bird seed. Well bird seed and a foam pool noodle. Those were the two things that rat had gone to town on. The first was for food. The second was probably an act of revenge, that rat hated pool noodles.
The next morning I got a call from my wife while I was in a meeting at work 20 miles away …
“There’s a huge rat caught on the glue trap. Are you coming home?”
This is probably the point in this story where I lose “hero husband” status.
“I can’t come home right now. I’m in the middle of a meeting and can’t leave.” I said.
“It’s a good thing you’re so freakishly handsome.” My wife said. She didn’t say that actually.
Instead she said, “AHHHHHHH the rat is screaming. He’s still alive and he’s screaming trying to get off the glue trap! AHHHHHH!”
And that’s when my wife just lost it. In later review of “the situation,” topical reference to the worst show MTV has ever made, I would come to theorize that the poor rat bore the brunt of all the anxiety we were feeling at that moment in our lives. Our daughter L.E. had just started kindergarten. My wife was leading a 15 person core group at a Community Bible Study. We were getting ready to release a book and then that black rat chewed his way into our lives.
A grandmother who lives next door came over and killed the rat with a garden tool. She later told me that every time she hit it, she asked Jesus to forgive her for killing one of God’s creatures. (Although someone on facebook commented that I should just turn my “man card” in, since I allowed a grandmother across the street to handle the animal business at my house, I’d like to point out that I was at work. Which is a shame, a dang shame.)
There are probably 37 different sermon illustrations in that experience, but the thing I found most interesting happened a few months later.
We found a roach in the garage and my wife turned to me and said, “We’ve never had so many bugs in our garage and we had that rat, I think this is a spiritual attack.” At first, I couldn’t tell if she was joking.
A rat? A roach? Minions of satan? Come on. Fire ants, those I can understand work strictly for Lucifer. I mean they have “fire” right in their names. But a rat?
The more we talked about it though, the more I thought she might be right, but I think as Christians we usually approach spiritual attacks in two wildly different ways:
1. We see everything as a spiritual attack.
Starbucks didn’t serve your coffee at the temperature you want? Spiritual attack! (People are actually asking for temperature specific coffee right now, they’re ordering 140 degree drinks as if their tongue is calibrated to tell the difference.)
2. We don’t see spiritual attacks in anything.
Your entire car engine falls out cleanly on the highway as you were driving to speak at your church and you found a pure black cobra wrapped around your bicycle when you tried to ride that instead, a la the Spirit Flyer book series? Just a coincidence.
Maybe I’m wrong, but most of the time I tend to fall into one of those two categories and ultimately I’m not sure either is right. But as I mentioned in post #666, rarely do my friends and I talk about stuff like this. So maybe today we can.
Where do you land?
What’s the craziest thing you’ve heard called a spiritual attack?
What’s the craziest thing you’ve heard called a coincidence?
