spanners from hell

Some days just don't go to plan at all.

In fact, very few days go exactly according to plan. But some days are worse than others. This was one of those.

One of those days when it seems that hell has a spanner-producing factory and decides to fling all of their surplus spanners into the works in a oner.

I should have got the message when I turned my computer on first thing and found that all of a sudden, out of the blue, and straight from that spanner factory, I had 9865 e-mails in my inbox.

Yes, you read that 4-digit number correctly! And that excluded the stuff which had come pouring into my 'junk' mail.

It would be nice to think you were really that popular, albeit it must be hard work replying to them all. But I'm not that naive.

Most of the nearly 10000 e-mails were total, utter drivel. Viagra figured prominently, and there were any number of offers being extended to me to find in the wilds of Russia the perfect partner I'd always been looking for.

The fact that I'm married, don't speak a word of Russian, and have a lot more time for the Niagara Falls than anything Viagra might do - that all seems to have slipped the notice of my varied correspondents.

It would be simpler just to delete them all. But in amongst the e-mails, at the rate of about 1 every 500, there was an e-mail I needed to see. So I had to go through the lot, zapping the bulk of the e-mails and saving the few.

In the time-consuming business of deletion, it did cross my mind that the process has a certain biblical resonance. Many are called, few are chosen sort of stuff.

That was the first set of spanners. The day didn't start too well. I should have known what was coming.

The second set of spanners was a series of interruptions. I didn't mind being interrupted, variety being the spice of life and all that sort of thing. But it rather threw the plans I'd had for getting certain things done.

It began to feel very much as if there were forces at work intent on thwarting my careful preparation for the service here this coming Sunday morning. Like every time I settled to that work, something else cropped up.

One of the interruptions was a man who called, struggling in the face of present problems, and feeling very low. Discouraged, downcast and .. well, dispirited. As if he, too, in the face of bombardment from hell, was feeling the Spirit of God had been somehow chased away.

Dis-spirited, he needed to be re-'spirited' again. A fresh infusion of the Spirit of God, a fresh anointing of grace and of power from God. So we chatted a bit and prayed a lot, and confronted the powers of darkness in Jesus' name.

Spanners from hell. But the Lord is good with the spanners that are flung his way. He uses them simply to tighten his people's resolve, to attach us more tightly to him and make us still more dependent on him.

There were spanners which came down the phone line as well. A call from a firm of undertakers, a visit which was then to be made. And a fruitless one it proved to be since the person was out, or at least not answering the security phone at the entrance to his block of flats.

Which meant, as well, that I couldn't even leave a card to say that I had called.

Anything, everything, to keep me from doing what today I had planned to do in preparing for Sunday morning.

However, I did eventually get to do some preparation. An hour or two, with a good lot of notes, as I tried at last to hammer things into some shape.

And then the coup de grace. Which is the biggest misnomer out, of course. Because it was all about anything other than grace! This was the climax of the whole day's spanner production in the factories of hell.

The computer 'crashed', and in that technical melt-down, all that I'd done was lost. It's somewhere out in that mythical realm called cyberspace.

I suppose if I had some sense of a calling to be the present-day apostle of cyberspace, I would maybe not have felt so bad. But I have no sense at all of any such calling. Instead I simply felt gutted.

Now I know that such things happen. It does just seem strange that they happen in this sort of way. Spanners from hell thrown into the works of the Lord.

But once I got that picture I could see just what was really going on. And why the Lord allowed it.

It's because of what Sunday will bring. Hell has a sense, I suspect, (though I'm not sure how) of the damage the Lord will be doing this coming Sunday morning.

And the Lord was insisting to me that he would take absolute charge. I must rely on the Lord. And not on my notes.

It should be quite a morning!