Teaching with M*A*S*H

I'm the mother of a bride-to-be... that alone can be "nuff said," but my story continues.

My daughter is doing all she knows to do to be worthy of the kind of marriage she wants. Anytime you make good choices and "Choose the Right," you also have an adversary to be mindful of. Mesa knows this, and this is the biggest choice she's ever made, so she is fully expecting the worst possible struggles to deal with. A few times now, she's been quite emotional and told us about having to face such demons and conquer them just to have something simple like a night out to dinner with her fiance. I started noticing a pattern develop and wasn't sure what was the best way to teach her...so at first, I said nothing.

It seems like when Divine Intervention steps in with me, it happens in the shower, although it has happened in a few other places too. I guess my Heavenly Father knows me well enough to know when I'm in the shower, I'm focused and He can slip in and talk to me in undeniable ways. He's so smart.

Thursday morning, I had gotten into the shower and had nothing on my mind except getting clean and getting ready for the company that would soon be at our house to swap cars out and get some things taken care of. That's a far cry from thinking about tv shows or my daughter, right? Well I thought so too,.... but in the midst of the water spraying on me, I was able to recall with a lot of detail a tv show I hadn't seen in YEARS. It's an episode of M*A*S*H. Do you know the show? There 2 characters in this show, Hawkeye and Honeycutt, who are best friends. These two guys start the show with Hawkeye playing a prank on Honeycutt. Honeycutt doesn't appreciate this prank at all and is rather perturbed. He tells the hysterically laughing Hawkeye that he WILL get even, and he'll do it when Hawkeye least suspects it. Hawkeye thinks he has this covered...he'll just always expect it, then he can't be surprised! Sounds like a plan, right? So he spends his day watching out for Honeycutt behind every door and every noise. He gets more and more jumpy as the day grows and ultimately, Hawkeye is unable to sleep, unable to eat, unable to walk past a leaf blowing in wind for suspecting Honeycutt is about to get him. Things DO happen to him too... he does trip over something,.. his lunch isn't cooked like he wants,... little things that always happen in life. Hawkeye drives himself crazy just waiting for his friend to prank him, and at the end of the show, he tells Honeycutt to just get it over with and do something! Honeycutt very nonchalantly tells him he doesn't have to,... he got himself. Hawkeye just stares in disbelief.....Honeycutt got him, but he did all the work.

It's a tv show, but it is REAL in ways I hadn't thought of before.
Satan is doing the same thing. Sometimes, he lets us get ourselves. Why should HE do the work we're willing to do for him? He doesn't care if we realize we're doing it or not,...just so long as it gets done. And perhaps we'll even think up things that haven't occurred to him to dream up FOR us to deal with. I'm sure he appreciates that.

Sometimes it is hard to recognize the things that happen in our lives as just a part of life,... something that happens solely because it is a reaction to an action. It isn't a personal thing, it's just a thing. Sometimes those happen JUST COINCIDE with our feelings, and its easy to assume it's all happening to us because demons are out to get us.

I think it's important to see the hand of God in everything around us. He's not making things happen to us, but He is allowing us to choose our perspective with it. Sometimes a flat tire is just a flat tire. Sometimes a cold wind is just a cold wind. Sometimes it might be more, but is it "more" as often as we think it is? or are we just pranking ourselves?