Only on Wednesdays

Something about Wednesdays.  October 8 - My car wouldn’t start.  October 15 - We were patching up plumbing problems, so I stayed at the house.  October 22 - The car wouldn’t start again, yet it worked just fine all the other days since we replaced the battery 2 weeks ago.  Each of these Wednesdays I’m not visiting patients in the hospital as planned.  I’m also not praying in front of the abortion center.  So I paused to think:  Why now?  What's happening now that might cause this?  Answer:  2 things.  (1) My husband and I set out to read the Bible in 90 days.  (2) I’ve been memorizing Romans 4 and 5.  Only these 2 things could I think of that were new in these recent weeks.  I asked friends for their insight, and most gave the same answer.  The chaplain at the hospital posed, “Do you get the idea the enemy doesn’t want you here?”  And that was pretty much what my friends said.  The Bible says in 1 Peter 5:8, “Be self-controlled and alert.  Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”  Yet 2 Timothy 4:18 says, “The Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and will bring me safely to his heavenly kingdom . . .”  Second Chronicles 16:9 attests to the eyes of the Lord always roaming the earth in our defense.  So all the time the devil is on the prowl to destroy, the eyes of the Lord are on the alert for our benefit.  The battle is spiritual.  We feel the heat.  The gunfire scrapes pretty close sometimes.  While I don’t consider every trial to come from Satan, in this instance the timing is curious.  Hospitals and abortion centers are certainly battlegrounds.  If Satan is on the prowl and mad about my praying there, he could be extra mad about the Bible reading and memorization.  It's certainly his mindset to try to thwart anything the Lord loves.  But the Lord wins ultimately.  Through every trial, through every irritating event, through every attempt to distract, the Lord provides us a way out.  And for my husband and me, the distractions and the rescues continue.  For that second morning when the car wouldn’t start, the Lord pointed us to the perfect YouTube post to replace the starter solenoid in our old 2000 Expedition.  Next we realized the front brakes starting to grind, and the Lord gave us cool weather for replacing them on a Sunday afternoon.  Following that, I drove to the furniture store to pick up our new bed and realized it wouldn’t fit in the car.  But there again, the Lord supplied the idea to use ratcheting tie-downs across the luggage rack.  Then came an incident in the church parking lot, which was of a different nature this time and not a mechanical problem.  It was a case of my mouth spewing.  I complained about the way my husband parked the car, and he bit back with sharp words of his own, revealing just how on-edge we’d really been.  Our bundle of tension had sat barely beneath the surface all this time, and it was amazing how the Lord protected us that we hadn't erupted earlier.  Though now our damages reached into the heart, still they could be forgiven.  Altogether our problems have been merely hassles.  The tug-of-war has made us tired, yet the Lord has replenished.  And I'm determined all the more not to relent on reading the Bible or on memorization.  The song “Onward, Christian Soldiers” comes to mind, for Christ really does lead us against the foe.  You, me, all of us.  Be encouraged that He fights on our behalf.