Don’t Let the Devil Steal Your Song!

I live right where the tornado touched down. Topeka will never forget the tornado, measuring three blocks wide at the base, that ripped through town during the summer of 1966.

Afterwards, I walked south from the Seabrook house. For about three blocks people’s TV antennas hung down. But when I got to the corner of 29th and Gage and looked across the street, I saw three luxury apartment complexes and a hundreds of homes reduced to rubble clear to the horizon. But now it’s all built up. No one would ever know.

A Tornado Named Divorce

When I was in the fourth grade and my brother in the first, a tornado named Divorce ripped through our family. This happened to no one else we knew. Just as tornados today still cause devastation and destruction, divorce, though commonplace and viewed casually, causes the same pain today as it did then.

Eight Words That Changed My Life Forever

Before the divorce, we saw Dad every day. We saw him off to work every morning. We welcomed him home every night. We ate meals and went on rides together. He made pancakes on Sunday morning and we went to church together. After the divorce we saw him for a few hours, three times a week. God gave us himself and he gave us each other, He gave me parents and he gave me a brother, That’s all I needed to know about love Until a hammer came down from above. Eight words changed my world forever.

“I’m going to file for divorce on Monday.” From that point on, I tried to escape the grinding reality of my life. But like a revolving door, it just kept coming around. As David Cogswell wrote in Existentialism for Beginners, “Ultimately, reality eventually breaks into our thoughts (p.16).” At what point your life may have become a “grinding reality” may be different for you. For me, it was my parents’ divorce.

Finding Your Sweet Spot

Believe it or not, no matter what has happened in your life, how old or how young you are, you can still find your “sweet spot” – that “place you want to be,” being who you were meant to be, with the people you were meant to be with, doing what you were meant to do – fulfilling your purpose – finding God’s will for your life.

Don’t Let the Devil Steal Your Song

Our song is our joy of living, our peace, our hope, our determination to face another day, our reason for living. Music makes life a lot brighter (unless, of course, the music itself is dark). We even talk about “changing our tune” when we mean changing our attitude, direction, or words. Since God had a purpose for creating us, it is no surprise that the devil would do all he can to stop it. But there are ways to thwart his plans.

Jesus said to the thief on the cross: “Today you will be with me in paradise.” He didn’t have time to straighten out a lot of business before he died. He didn’t get to do all the things on his bucket list. He just believed and Jesus received him.

Picture for a minute a golf tee stuck in some bright green grass. A hand reaches down and places a golf ball on it. Suddenly someone you can’t see swings the club and hits that ball. But the person hitting the ball has a purpose; he has a plan.

He will stay with us for the rest of the course, and if we stay with him, we will arrive safely at our destination. If we give control of the golf club to another, unauthorized entity (spurred on by our own selfcentered desires or those of others who lead us astray), ultimately, the demonic forces of spiritual darkness will pull us away from God into eternal destruction. We have the power to choose to whom we give permission to drive the ball of our lives.