All In a Day's Work
I have many friends who are retired police officers. There is something different about them. They are low responders. When something goes wrong, they stay calm. That's not me. I sometimes feel like a chicken with its head cut off, or the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. I don't have what it takes to be in law enforcement. It's not in my nature.
As I thought about my low-responding police friends, I wondered if one's career or vocation might, by its nature, create a spiritual weakness that Satan can exploit. I reached out to people in different vocations and asked them if they faced unique spiritual challenges because of that vocation. The consensus was yes.
Pig Out
My dad was an all-or-nothing kind of guy. If he was interested in something, he never took it slowly. When he began running, he did marathons. When he heard about intermittent fasting, he started by fasting for three days at a time. He never tested the water first. Just jumped in completely.
I am a bit like him, especially with spiritual things.
Lions and Tigers and Bears - O My!
Spiritual Warfare Continued: I have heard that the Bible says, Do not be afraid 365 times, one for each day of the year. I'm not sure how accurate that is because you can't believe everything you see on the internet, and I have not actually counted it myself. But the point is that we should not be afraid. God often repeats these words because we often need to hear them.
The Perfect Storm
The Perfect Storm is a movie from 2000 that tells the true story of a fishing boat that encountered three dangerous weather fronts that unexpectedly collided to produce the worst storm in modern history. One weather front might have been manageable, or even two, but with all three, the storm was so fierce that the boat sank and all the crew members were lost.
The perfect storm in a spiritual battle is when multiple related people are each attacked at the same time, and the individual attacks are coordinated to bring maximum damage.
Always a Critic
Many years ago, I was the Human Resources Manager in a hotel. One of my responsibilities was to assist in performance reviews, and in one of those reviews, I was unexpectedly on the receiving end of the feedback. I had interrupted the employee, and she called me on it. I did not like that, especially because she was an employee whom I didn't much care for. But she was right. And she criticized me well because she told me why interrupting was a problem. In her words, "It's like what you have to say is more important than what I have to say." Ouch!