He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not by Trish Ryan

Author:Trish Ryan [RYAN, TRISH]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000
ISBN: 9780446536134
Publisher: FaithWords
Published: 2008-04-30T04:00:00+00:00

BEFORE I COULD sort that out, things got even stranger. The Bible also said that God was not the only player in the spiritual drama going on around us. Indeed, the same evil being who convinced Adam and Eve to eat the fruit was alive and in the world today, it said, tempting, taunting, and lying to us in order to lure us away from God. The Bible described the devil—a fallen angel, not a cartoon with horns and a spear—as a spiritual being whose sole goal was to ruin our lives, tempting us with things that aren’t God’s best for us, the same way he tempted Eve. It called this being Satan, a serpent, the Deceiver, the Accuser, the Enemy, and the Prince of This World. The Apostle Peter described him “prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.”

I had no mental grid for the notion of a Kingdom of Evil actively seeking to thwart God’s best for me, or the suggestion that we were all warriors in a cosmic spiritual battle. The warlike imagery synced up with my childhood sense that something big was going on around us, though, and explained why there were so many inspiring movies about good triumphing over evil, none of which involved the hero turning his back on the villain and saying, “You’re just not real.”

I spent hours dissecting these passages with Amy, begging her to make sense of this craziness. “Do you believe this stuff?” I asked, wondering if her business colleagues knew about this prowling lion thing.

“Yes I believe it,” she assured me. “I’ve seen it; it’s real.”

“What’s real?” I pressed, baffled that this seemed so natural to her, that she woke up each day believing that Jesus could protect her from mistakes and regret and shame.

“Jesus is real,” she started. “And Satan is real, too. The Bible tells us there’s a war between them going on all around us here on earth, and that the only way to win it is through Jesus.”

“What about the people who don’t know Jesus?” I countered. “What happens to them?”

“They get caught in the middle—in the crossfire,” she acknowledged. “It sucks, because they don’t even know what’s happening to them. Why do you think some believers can be so obnoxious in sharing their faith? It’s because the stakes seem so high and they want people to know that Jesus is the only way out of hell—eternally, but also here in everyday life.”

I stared at her, wide-eyed. I had no idea what to say to that. Here was a girl I respected: she was smart, normal, gainfully employed. There was no reason for her to fall back into some crazy religion to make her life work; her life worked fine. And yet she believed this stuff. How? I wondered. Why? I thought back to that day at Kristen’s house when I’d tried to meditate; how I’d been chased from the room by that vision of a giant man with a sledgehammer, then overwhelmed by the feeling I was being shot through with poison.

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