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DEMONS

                                              

I’ve been thinking about demons lately. Which is probably not what you want to hear from the guy next to you at dinner. “How are the kids?” “Great. Anyway...demons.” Pass the potatoes.

When I was a teenager, my family played with a Ouija board. We thought we were just messing around. We weren’t. I still see and hear things from that night. They still scare me. I believe the others who sat at that table carry the same quiet dread. It was real. It was unexplainable. And it left a mark.

So I don’t need convincing that the unseen world is real. What I need is a better understanding of how it works now. Because maybe the devil doesn’t need spinning heads and floating furniture anymore. Maybe he just needs Facebook.

If I were trying to destroy people, I wouldn’t bother possessing them. Too much paperwork. I’d simply convince every one of us that the person across the table is the enemy. Then I’d whisper: They’re ruining everything. And we’d do the rest... unfriend cousins, stop speaking to neighbors, turn Thanksgiving into Crossfire, and scroll until the algorithm confirms what we already wanted to believe.

Scripture says the enemy comes to steal, kill, and destroy. I used to picture fire and pitchforks... the kind of night I still remember from that board. But pride rarely introduces itself as pride. It shows up dressed as conviction. Sometimes carrying a Bible, a lawn sign or both.

Suddenly the people across from us aren’t mistaken. They’re evil. They aren’t neighbors. They’re them. And somewhere the devil puts his feet up and says, “Excellent. They’ve got it from here.”

Jesus never seemed interested in helping us win arguments. He said the most inconvenient things: Love your enemies. Pray for the ones who persecute you. Forgive. Love your neighbor.

Terrible material for cable news. Nobody gets a primetime show called Tonight: I Listened Carefully and Discovered I Might Be Wrong.

Ephesians says our struggle is not against flesh and blood. Yet flesh and blood is exactly what we keep fighting. Justice and truth matters. Fight for what is right. Just don’t become the thing you claim to oppose. You can win the argument and lose your humanity. You can defend Christianity while looking nothing like Christ. You can be so sure God is on your side that you never ask whether you are still on His.

That question still bothers me. Because the real spiritual battle might not be happening in the dark with candles and a board. It might be happening in the three seconds between hearing something you hate and deciding what kind of person you’re going to become next.

One voice says: Hate them. The other says: Love them anyway.

And the oldest trick in the book is still working: convince us the demon looks like the person we disagree with.

I already know what real darkness feels like. I sat at that table.

The question is whether I’ll recognize it when it shows up wearing my own face.

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