Interpretations

In 1980-81, when Susie and I were working at an orphanage in Mexico, a missionary organization called Youth With A Mission (YWAM) had organized an outreach South 'o the border in the vicinity of where we were, Monterrey in the state of Nuevo Leone. Due to "bad luck" with regards to timing, the semi loaded with Bibles was held up at the border due to an unannounced meeting between the newly elected President Reagan and Lopez Portilla, president of Mexico. The presidential summit took place in the border town where the semi had spent the night, so all traffic going north or south was held in limbo for a day. The problem is, there are two checkpoints to pass, the first when you enter Mexico, the second twenty miles in. This allows people to cross into the border towns for shopping, putting fuel in their diesel trucks etc. If you are going deeper into the interior you had to cross the second checkpoint within the same 24 hours as the first.

When the YWAM teams arrived in Monterrey from all over North America the Bibles they were planning to disperse did not. You can imagine how this might have been interpreted. The devil did not want those Bibles to get into Mexico.

When we learned of the assembly of 600 young people in Monterrey looking for something to do, we set about to meet with them and invite them to the orphanage where we were working. There were plenty of needs. We had approximately 120 children between the ages of three and fifteen and a whole lot of run down buildings badly in need of repairs, chiefly due to the belief that saving souls was more important than upkeep of facilities.

Our cordial invitations succeeded. Many of the YWAM teams did indeed come out to the children's home and heartily pitched in to paint the buildings, repair screens on the cafeteria where disease-laden flies were landing on children's meals, to repair the roof of the chapel and carry out other practical tasks. I especially remember the team from California who said that on the way to the YWAM outreach here they had seventeen flat tires or blowouts on the trailer that hauled their supplies.

What struck me about this was the interpretation of the cause of the blowouts. They said it was the devil. Clearly, by grit and determination they had come all that way, despite delays, and made it by God's grace to Monterrey. The Lord clearly had them there for a purpose, because the devil was unable to stop them.

I mean no disrespect to the faith in this matter, but I have to stop here and ask one question. Why did it never enter anyone's minds that the reason they kept blowing tires, seventeen in all, was not a spiritual warfare issue but a physics issue? They had too much weight in the trailer and the tires were not designed for the use to which they were put.

Events happen. How we interpret those events will result in our being able to bring resolution to the problems we encounter in life, in our relationships, in the workplace. By interpreting every little thing as a matter of spiritual warfare, we never come to grips with the real problems we're dealing with, or recognizer the simple solutions to the issues we face.

Many religions profess that the mind is the enemy of enlightenment. "Kill the snake," said Guru Majaraji, the snake "deceiver" being our minds. Similar sentiments are expressed in other Eastern religions. For me, Christianity's appeal is built on a foundation that corresponds with sense and a certain intellectual satisfaction. Knowledge and understanding should not be entirely at odds with common sense. Nor does Christian meditation mean emptying the mind, rather it means filling the mind with truth and contemplating the richness of this good content, the bread of life.

That's my interpretation on these things. But as Paul states at the end of I Corinthians 13, "We see through a glass darkly." I am willing to be proven wrong.

What's your take on these things?