Another ordinary miracle

Another ordinary spiritual attack

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My twelve-year-old son got in trouble at school yesterday. He had to be taken home early. He's a great kid, very sensitive, extremely bright, compassionate, and ...

... depreseed.

We've been working through various things to help him. Tested and diagnosed with inattentive ADD, tested and diagnosed with various sensory processing disorders, he presents us with a multi-faceted problem. We've been getting him various therapies targetting the problems that have made him a social misfit of sorts (at times), trying certain drugs to help boost the right kind of brain activity to address the organic aspects of the ADD, etc. My wife quit her job several months ago so she could help prepare him for sixth grade by working through vision therapy, occupational therapy, ensuring he got healthy activity every day, etc. We've been reading books, changing our parenting approach, etc., and I've decided to work on my own similar problems and get help for them. Every time things got better for my son, it wouldn't last, and he would run into another emotional wall. He's so immature for his age, so "behind the curve" in large-muscle motor skills, so disgraphic, etc., that we have to address a lot of different things, but he can only stand the stress of a little bit of "work" at a time.

This year, school has at times become unbearably stressful for him. But when we look into it, there really isn't anything all that stressful about it for a "normal" person. It has been hard to accept that this exceptionally wonderful son has turned out to be a "special needs child". It doesn't detract from his value one bit, or what makes him so wonderful, but it does add a large set of problems to the set of difficulties of ordinary parenting. Oh yes, I could recommend some books that have been helpful, but that isn't my point here.

Yesterday at school, someone overheard him telling someone else that he wanted to commit suicide. They reported it.

We've heard him say those sorts of things without fully meaning it, but it is a natural thing to think about with extended bouts of depression, especially for someone as dramatic as this boy. But the school has this policy, you see. So he was pulled out of class, and my wife had to retrieve him. Fortunately, they were already heading to a long-awaited first visit with a psychiatrist, so they just got there a little earlier than planned. A child psychiatrist is often the only doctor you can find who will prescribe certain drugs, like anti-depressants, for children. But they are few and far between, and getting an appointment with one of good repute around here often involves a long wait. It's just the next chapter in a continuing story. The latest twist is a new drug, which at first is causing extreme nausea; and the need to do some specific testing for Asperger Syndrome.

But I don't want to belabor this story, which is very long and complicated if I focus on my son. Instead, I want to share with you a short scene from my own personal struggle with all of this. First though, I'll mention that at about this same time, my wife has also come under a targeted spiritual attack, where a rather sick individual (whom she fired a while back) has been spreading a rather outrageous rumor about her. It is completely obvious to anyone familiar with her or the truth of how she resigned from her job that this is a rediculous, fabricated lie. But it could still be very damaging to her professional reputation and her future pursuit of certain dreams God has placed in her heart. It is slander, and illegal, but a defamation lawsuit does not make sense without provable damages (especially with no permanent record of the defamation, which could turn it into libel instead of just slander). That has been disturbing. And to see my son also being vulnerable, by way of his depression, to the deceit of evil spirits is doubly troubling.

Ordinary spiritual warfare

Seeing these struggles as involving a spiritual component with a malicious and destructive strategy of deception, I'm reminded that our struggle is not against flesh and blood. Not the person spreading these rumors. Not the organic contributors to my son's stress and depression. But rather, the kingdom of darkness and the evil spirits that pull strings and whisper deceit and play their ugly role. The devil is still God's devil, as someone once said, but part of this divine drama involves getting to play this role of being a divinely-equipped warrior in a spiritual battle, even though the end of the war has already been sealed.

A word from one of several men I asked to pray with me about the situation focused on the wording "above all" in the Ephesians passage about the "armour of God". The piece given the "above all" qualifier was the "sheild of faith", with which we can extinguish the flaming darts of the enemy. I was thinking through all those parts of the armor of God today while also praying about the dual situation with my wife and son, mostly during some aerobic exercise this morning. I was especially asking God to speak to me and direct me regarding my son's situation.

Ordinary miracle

Moving on to a shower after exercise, I was finishing my meditation by considering the sword of the spirit, and specifically asking God to grant me some insight that would help me to take hold of His word in an effective way to use it as a weapon in this battle. I needed to be able to get a good grip on the handle, meaning: I needed to find just the right living word from God to help defeat the suicidal thinking my son had been experiencing. And as I prayed expectantly, I got a biblical reference in my thoughts, right out of nowhere. Given the context, I knew this was an answer. It was "Exodus twenty, twelve, and thirteen." But I had absolutely no memory of what I might find in Exodus twenty, or the chapter before, or the chapter after. No clue.

So when I came home after work, I looked it up. It turns out that Exodus twenty covers the "Ten Commandments" (they are also covered elsewhere). It also turns out that those two verses, twelve and thirteen, happen to be the exact two of those ten commandments that my son would be breaking by committing or planning to commit suicide. Twelve is the one about honoring father and mother so that you can live a long life. Thirteen is to not commit murder. I also reviewed the others, and none of the others would seem to say much about suicide, directly. But those two hit on themes I had already been thinking about with regard to the whole topic, but I had never thought of it in terms of the ten commandments. I had thought of "no murderer... shall inherit the kingdom" (let's not go there right now), and similar New Testment bits, but never the ten commandments.

I did share this with my son, and my wife, later. And I led up to it by asking my son about how Jesus handled temptation, because I believe that my son is ultimately the one who needs to take up this sword of the spirit as his defense against these spiritual attacks of suicidal thoughts. So I presented this as a tool for him to use in this battle, given miraculously from God. But the neat thing here is that God spoke to me; or rather, that I was actually able to hear Him speak to me. And the direct relevance of what I "heard" to what I was asking for is irrefutable. I do not have the bible memorized, and could not have even guessed what might be in Exodus 20, and the idea that my subconsious could somehow have remembered that those two verses were those two commandments is downright ludicrous. I would never have even guessed that this would be a good idea. But after it all came together, it was very clearly a word from God to me in answer to my specific request about a very specific need.

This is the sort of everyday miraculous walk with God that many Christians I know experience practically every day. My own wife sometimes has this sort of thing go on multiple times throughout the course of a single day, leading to unplanned miraculous ministry at the guidance of God in ways no human being could even plan if they tried. I myself don't experience it quite that often, but I'm trying to walk in an attitude of awareness and gratitude, and expectant readiness, so that I can experience it more regularly. If you've never experienced this sort of thing, you may not have any inkling of just how "normal" and "ordinary" God wants it to be, even for you. Unfortunately, some of us have to go through some difficult things to get to a point where we are tuned in and paying attention.

I am so grateful to God for His grace in granting such good gifts by His Spirit, that I just feel the need to honor Him here by sharing this story with you. It's a wonderful reality that God provides such clearly miraculous answers to prayer, don't you think?

Sins of an entire society, and their judgment

Sins of an entire society

and their judgment

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I've been thinking lately about the civil war lately. More about slavery, though. Yes, I know that the war itself and the reasons people fought to the death in it were mostly not about slavery. But in a spiritual sense, it most assuredly was, almost entirely, a consequence of the unrepentant sin of slavery that had continued to the point where any hope of repentance was gone. Sin gave birth.

It was, in a very real sense, a necessary tribulation of great suffering that this country went through in the civil war, and was equally important that the South had to suffer so much. Many, many genuine believers could not set aright in their own minds and hearts their views on the topic of slavery, being overwhelmed by the sad "necessity" that had generally become accepted of that institution. Intelligent and God-fearing people promoted the most ridiculous of rationalizations. I can imagine how easy it would be, if transported back in time, to preach on the biblical principles of how slavery -- if it were to exist at all -- should be managed by God's laws in order to be acceptable to God, how grossly perverted the American form of slavery had deviated from those principles, and how all who supported the continuance of the institution were siding with all the wrong sides in so many biblical stories, even competing with the worst of those bad examples of evil characters. But outside of a few abolitionists, whose movement apparently "lost" in the South during the earlier 1800's as people made up their minds on the mater, I don't think such preaching would have any effect other than to get the preacher "run outta town". Ok, I'm not a historian by any stretch; rather, I'm just thinking there is an analogy to be drawn here.

I think about how Pharaoh's heart was hardened -- and the result was that God could make His demonstration all the more transformative to all who would hear of it. I don't think Pharaoh himself is so much the issue as was Egypt and what God wanted to reveal using Egypt as a role in a play. Doesn't God just as well harden the heart of a nation as that of its leader? As Paul tells the Romans of such patterns -- "God gave them over to a depraved mind". It seems to me that this is also what happened even among His own people in the South during the mid 1800's. Hearts of many in the South had become equally hardened, even among the very people of otherwise strong faith. This is something like a "curse" on an entire sub-culture. I think God does that sometimes to allow what is evil to become apparent as truly evil -- so things have to get worse and more polarized in order for the evil to be purged so that the whole can be healed and restored. Its a drama at a national level more than the personal level.

I think there is an important lesson in there somewhere. Perhaps we are all equally guilty of hardening our hearts to the sins of our present-day culture, unwilling to expend any energy on a "lost cause", no matter how great its sadness (to which we only give lip service). 100 years after that war, the legacy of darkness in peoples hearts still flavored many of the influences I grew up with, even among family and church-goers that served as some of my best Christian examples in early childhood. That is a testimony to the lasting devastation of societal sin. When an oppressed people is kept down, then children both within and without will learn by generalization that there is something wrong with that people. I was exposed repeatedly to such ideas that "colored people just smell different, and to us white folks, it stinks." When the majority of "colored" people I encountered happened to be the poorest and most dejected in society, who didn't have hot water in their home and who therefore only rarely took a bath in the winter, then I would of course assume that this idea was true due to the "evidence" that I myself had experienced. It was "ok" to be served food by the black church custodian because -- well, after all, if you looked at his hands it was plain to see that all the black had come off through years of hard work -- they looked like a white man's hands. This was what I grew up with. I was never formally taught any of this; it was just what kids said, even older kids, and sometimes even adults. Only much later as an adult did I learn that my 1st grade class was the very first in which white and black were integrated into the same school -- I had not know that as a child. But the civil rights movement had brought change, finally, and what began as a seed continued to grow. Today's young generation probably cannot imagine the widespread and open prejudice and discrimination that was rampant when I was a child. When I visit my home town in the South now, it is a completely different world with respect to racial equity and integration -- I can assume there are still some issues, but it seems like a wonderful transformation to me.

As my years of schooling in an integrated environment allowed me to develop a more accurate understanding, and the learnings of adolescence and young adulthood allowed me to view my society's values more critically, I felt good to be breaking free from this racist nonsense. But even as a professional adult, I still noticed once when a black coworker handed me something to eat that I still had a thought from my earliest informal indoctrination -- a momentary idea of "taintedness" or "uncleanliness" of something touched by a black person. I was shocked and appalled that I would still have such a thought, even though of course I dismissed it as nonsense immediately, graciously accepting my coworker's offer. But that this concept would still linger in my subconscious after all these years left me feeling deeply ashamed. And so it is not hard to understand how the societal repression of an entire "race" was able to continue for over 100 years after they were set free from slavery.

But what of this present culture in America? Or in your own neck of the world, if that be somewhere else? What horrible sins are being rationalized and justified against the Spirit of God by our society today? Is there something as bad as America's former institution of slavery? Is there something worse? And what will be the consequences if it is not corrected? Will God give us over to a depraved mind with respect to that topic, hardening our hearts so that even the elect will be deceived? What great tribulation must we pass through to be purged of such evil? And what will someone say 100 years from now is still a legacy of damage from the sins of this generation? It's something to think about. And though I do have some initial thoughts on the matter, I'm not interested in debating the topic -- it's more for inward reflection right now. So I share the questions for whatever benefit you might find in them, though I am sharing all this fairly openly and somewhat carelessly with less attention to erudition than you might prefer.