HIDDEN: GOD GIVES JANE A MANDATORY TIMEOUT
I do the writing on my articles. Jane does the promotion. If you know Jane, you know she is outspoken. Last Wednesday she got mad at one of the social media where she promotes my stuff and was going to write a big exposé on censorship. But God put her in a timeout.
Before she could get on the computer, she went to buy stamps. When she came out, she got in the car, and it wouldn’t start. She called the insurance company, and they said they’d send out a guy to jumpstart it.
President Trump was in town, so the traffic was backed up all over, but the guy finally showed up, and the jumpstart didn’t work. He even got under the car, pounded the starter (which he said, sometimes works), and still, nothing helped. Jane started out about 8:00 in the morning and now it was already close to 11:00, three hours! Jane called the insurance company again, and they said they’d send out a tow truck.
Under normal circumstances, Jane would have been furious by this time, but God had already taken care of that. The car was in front of the Office Depot, and though the weather was still hot, the car was in the shade. She went into the store, got a soda and cookies and she’d just picked up some new movies from a friend, so she had those to watch on her computer. She was perfectly calm about everything and just waited. Even if she had wanted to write her scathing exposé, she couldn’t because she had no WIFI.
The tow truck finally arrived at 1:30 p.m. When Jane got to the repair place, there was still no WIFI, so no letter. Instead, she had a cup of coffee and watched what was on T.V., a show whose main actress is on Jane ‘s prayer list. The car needed a new starter, but since we put in a starter a year earlier, they put in a new one for free. I got a ride after work to where she was, and by then Jane had no inspiration to write the exposé. That idea had fizzled out. By 8:30 that evening, we both realized it was God who used a faulty starter to ground Jane, giving her a mandatory timeout. It wasn’t time for the exposé.
All day long I was getting texts from Jane, and it surprised me that she wasn’t angry, frustrated or anxious. I thought, “Who took the real Jane?” She was unusually calm in a situation in which she would have “naturally” been ballistic! At about 9 p.m. we were back at home. We laughed, thanked God for His sense of humor and went to bed.
God knew just how to keep Jane out of trouble, under the radar and happy all day long in a normally tiring and grueling situation.
Sometimes we just need to stay below the radar, stay invisible to the enemies, instead of going after them. Jesus did this with the scribes and Pharisees in Jerusalem. Jesus embarrassed them when they wanted him to authorize stoning the woman caught in adultery. They wanted to shut him up permanently.
“They took up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by” (John 8:59). And the next thing we see is Jesus teaching more great truths and healing a man who was born blind. In the situation where the Pharisees were determined to stop Jesus, God put him undercover, and Jesus just walked through the crowd, but the enemy was unable to see him.
Jane was put in a timeout on her letter to the social media, but also the Lord has been showing us that we need to go undercover on some of our prayers as well. We have to ask for God to shield us under His wings and have angels scramble the air, so demons don’t hear all of our prayers. They don’t need to know what we’re up to.
Just like Jesus walked through the midst of that crowd and no one saw Him, we can pray powerful specific prayers that no enemies can see either. In the Old Testament times, God hid Elisha. He gave Elisha revelation on when the Syrians were going to ambush Israel. The Syrians found out where Elishah lived and a great army went down to arrest him. But God hid him.
“And when they came down to him, Elisha prayed unto the Lord, and said, ‘Smite this people, I pray thee, with blindness.’ And he smote them with blindness according to the word of Elisha” (2 Kings 6:18). Then when they were blinded, they couldn’t see that Elisha was the man they were after. “And Elisha said unto them, ‘This is not the way, neither is this the city: follow me, and I will bring you to the man whom ye seek. But he led them to Samaria” (v. 19). Elisha told them he’d take him to find the man they were after and led them right into the enemy's camp!
God will hide us in plain sight if we need it, like He did for Jesus and Elisha. He will hide our prayers from the enemy and scramble their receptors if we ask. And He will go so far as to ground us and make us take a mandatory timeout if He sees our boldness could get us in too much trouble.
We are His warriors, and He is our camouflage.
Love, Carolyn
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