Spiritual Attack
From my journal...
The past two weeks have been pretty rough – work has been very busy. Not only busy. But lots of production work, lots of outages. We had a release over last weekend, nothing went right. We were really over time, two releases (core and DS) in one weekend, DDL blew up, perf problems on Monday. Then we had another one to setup some database infrastructure for NJ this past weekend. Again. Bad task plans, faulty passwords, and the final straw, Shareplex activation that just wouldn’t work.
These things are tested, just like always.
D said to me this morning, “Is someone sabotaging you?”
That got me to really do some thinking.
And I think the answer is yes.
This is probably the busiest time for SPACE yet, simply because the tone of the summer needs to get launched. Four trips, all with parent meetings, forms, packets, PR. Not to mention scheduling all of this in between two retreats in one month. And finding this one set of leaders for 9th grade… What’s most strategic for the enemy to win? For these trips to fall apart. For me to get so busy with work I have no time for anything else. For my job to suffer, especially with me having a new boss – Ken, that all of the security we counted on for doing both Verizon and a commitment to students falls by the wayside. For me to say that work is much too important to be involved in church stuff. Hmm.
So this morning I had a pretty dialogue with God about this stuff, on the way to get McDonalds for everyone. Asking Him to keep Satan out of the picture, to protect me, to protect my relationship with Ken, the integrity of my team, to keep the releases working the right way. We will never know what went wrong with some of that stuff. I remember saying to D this morning, “I feel like everything I’m doing at work fails” I continued to pray that I would make no agreements with Satan. I’m not at fault, I’m not a terrible manager, my team is not falling apart. That God would allow things at work to flow smoothly in order that I would be able to continue to make the SPACE trips work out. And that we would find a leader for 9th grade.
I’m convinced now, after thinking about it all day, that the software problems at work, and the fallout associated, all stem from me doing something that Satan does not like. It’s a spiritual battle, and Satan is using something as generic as software to attack me on a level associated with my job. In our Western worldview, we don’t believe that Satan would be able to use something as benign as software to wage a spiritual war. But I believe it, it certainly is a battle and I’m finally seeing what is really going on here.
