Round and Round and Round

How did that happen? I got off the wrong exit of the freeway. In fact I didn’t even remember taking the exit, but there I was on the south side of town, instead of the north. It was late at night, but I wasn’t tired, so I hadn‘t dozed off. In fact I had been singing praise songs and praying and rejoicing all the way home from Salem. I had heard Charles Stanley speak at a ministerial conference, and I was pumped. I mean, really pumped! (But that’s another story.)

It was shortly after midnight. It was no big deal to get to my home in Gladstone by way of the south exit, rather than the other. It just wasn’t my normal route. So it hadn’t happened absent mindedly, either. My only conclusion was that it must have somehow been a God thing. I told myself to keep my eyes open all the way home to see if God had gotten me off that exit for a reason.

Sure enough. There it was. That must be it. There was a car driving around in a circle around a light pole in the Thriftway parking lot. Round and round and round. I pulled into the parking lot and got out of my car. Carefully I walked to the inside of the circle to try to talk to the driver. But the car kept going -- round and round – while I patiently stood there. Finally it stopped. The driver rolled down the window. A young lady looked up at me, distraught and forlorn looking. Ashen, almost deathly looking.

I asked her to please tell me how long she had been driving in circles, and why. Slowly she began to talk. She had been driving in circles for about an hour, she said. She was trying to get her courage up. Courage to go out on the freeway and drive into an overpass abutment to end her life.

Wow, God. What a rescue. At least I hoped so. We talked for a long time that night. Finally, I felt comfortable she would be okay. She sensed love and concern, and showed signs of new hope. I wasn’t sure, though. Not being a suicide counselor, I did the best I could. I invited her to come to the church office the next morning and talk some more, leaving to go on home and watching as she continued her driving. Round and round and round.

The next morning she showed up at the office. We talked for several hours. We read the Bible. She told me her story, her failures, her despair. But God was opening her heart and understanding. She prayed and asked Jesus to come into her life.

I knew that her salvation was the only the first stride out of the starting blocks. She had a long race before her. But she was in the race.

I wish that was the end of the story. But things don’t always end glorious and pretty. Parts of her story that she told me prompted me to ask her a question. “Do you hear voices in your mind?” She was startled, dumbfounded that I would ask. She said, “Yes! They scream it over and over and over.” In the native tongue of her foreign father, the voice screamed, “God is dead! Long live Tuvo!” Her biological father had been a high priest in the satanic, occultic religion of the Central American country where she was conceived.

That young lady consumed my time and energy trying to help her be set free, but she was never whole-hearted after God. She was deceptive, divisive, and disruptive. As I look back, now, I wonder who really got me off that freeway exit? Was it God? Or was it a demon? Round and round I go in my mind, wondering. I may never be sure.

"Sir, didn't you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from? " "An enemy did this," he replied. (Matthew 13:27-28)