A Battle of a Different Sort

This post is about one of those things that I don't talk about very often - spiritual warfare. It's not that I don't believe it happens, but often it is used as an excuse more than anything else. You know, the old, "the devil made me do it" excuse. Not that I don't believe that Satan does some things in this world to mess with us, but too often spiritual warfare is the first thing that people turn to when it is often a case of people just messing up. However, I have noticed that when God is in the midst of doing something good, a lot of times bad things tend to pile up all at once. It is when these bad things happen in clumps just when God is doing something big that I tend to think about spiritual warfare, and what a total jerk Satan can be sometimes.

The most recent example is the past month in our church. My wife and I took 14 youth and 3 other adults on a mission trip to Carthage, TX (which you can scroll down and read a little more about later). It was an awesome trip, and we really saw God working in a big way while we were there, especially on our final night in Texas. We experienced what we have referred to as a "mini-revival." It was awesome, youth were crying and praying for one another. Our group came together in a way that I had never seen before. It was simply awesome.

The next day, on the way home, one of our youth made a bad decision. It was a decision so bad that, for some, it was a serious wet blanket on the fire that was started during the trip. It was one thing that I didn't want to deal with, and ended up staying up until nearly 1a.m. dealing with it on a night before we were leaving at 6:30a.m. in the morning for an 11 hour drive. The situation still hasn't come to a complete resolution, and is often in the back of my mind, especially when it is quiet and I'm trying to pray through some things. If this was all that was going on in our church, then I probably wouldn't be thinking too much about spiritual warfare. The timing, yes, was incredibly bad - God had just done something amazing, and someone makes an incredibly bad decision to sour the mood. However, it is not.

Our church is also at capacity for our two services. We've been planning for the last few months to start another service at the 9:30 timeslot. Plans have been going along very smoothly. Things are working out in a relatively timely fashion. We're less than a month away from kicking off this new service, and it hits.

First off, as of right now, we do not have a new music director to replace the young man who had been leading music for the last several years at our church (who went off to NYU to work on his Master's degree). The person who was supposed to lead the music for the children's worship is now still committed to leading the main worship services until we do have a new music director. Secondly, nearly all of our program staff are dealing with some sort of family health issue. Our senior pastor's father-in-law had a heart cath last week. My mother-in-law had an emergency appendectomy. Our office administrator's father underwent some serious surgery for cancer in his esphogas (how do you spell that?). Our children's ministry director's father-in-law is also dealing with some potentially serious cancer stuff.

Normally, if just one of these things was happening, I wouldn't think too much about it. But the timing is unreal. These are all serious things - not to mention that our senior pastor and preschool director are also dealing with their oldest going away from home - one to college an hour and a half away, and the other to a junior hockey club in Boston, Mass. Yet, in spite of all of this, we are moving on. We are convinced that this is something God has in store for us. We're excited, we believe there is a new focus for people to grow spiritually in our church, and we will face these trials knowing that they come because we are doing something right. We're carefully listening to the prompting of the Spirit and moving forward in a direction that we firmly believe is God-driven.

All I have to say now is something that I saw on a shirt before: Poop on Satan.

That is all.