The Devil is a Liar

I was heading home from church when the blizzard started. Every Sunday, I'd drive an hour and a half from Jersey to Connecticut to be in church, then make the long drive back so I could be at work Monday morning. I rarely missed a Sunday. If I did, it had to be for a good reason.

I'd been wrestling with what it meant to be saved for years by then. Every Sunday in service, every weeknight in between. On the way to a party, on the way home from one, every time something happened that I couldn't square with what I'd been taught. The wrestling didn't stop when church ended.

I was about 20 minutes from Morristown, NJ, heading south on 287, when my 2007 VW Jetta started to slide. Brake lights flared in front of me. I slammed on the brakes. The car kept sliding.

Kanye West's Monster was blasting through the speakers, a dark anthem that suddenly felt like a twisted soundtrack to my last moments. I didn't even like it that much, but listening in that moment made me feel guilty, as though I'd invited disaster into my life. My biggest fear had always been dying and going to hell — either because I was somewhere I shouldn't have been, or under the influence of some secular force.

The thought that came next wasn't fear of death. It was: they gonna say at church on Sunday he was listening to Monster. They gonna have to pray extra hard at his funeral.

I remembered Ty, the guy who played keyboard for a group I sang with in high school. He died in a car accident, apparently coming home from a strip club in New York. The church was full of stories like his — people dying in sin, supposedly going straight to hell.

Not me. Not yet. Not this.

I gripped the steering wheel, desperately turning it, praying to avoid a fatal collision. The car swerved sharply, the tires losing their grip. Somehow, I steered away from the cars ahead, but I couldn't control where I was heading. The Jetta jerked to the side, skidded up an embankment, and crashed into a small tree.

Hours later, when I finally made it home, my mom called. After lecturing me about the insurance and what to do next, she said, "The devil is a liar." She rebuked the plan and attack of the enemy, but for some reason, her words didn't land like they used to.

The truth was, I'd turned off the traction control myself earlier in the trip because I thought the squiggly lines symbol was for snow. Turns out it was the opposite, and I'd been driving too fast for the road conditions.

I pressed the button. I didn't know what it did. I drove too fast for the snow. The car slid because of physics, not because of an enemy.

And that's when I caught what the construct had been doing for me my whole life. The devil wasn't tempting me. The devil was where I'd been putting things. The crash was mine. The DUI a month earlier was mine. The wrestling every Sunday was mine. But the construct had always given me somewhere to set those things down, somewhere outside of me, so I didn't have to carry them as my own.

I used to hear Christians say, "The devil's best trick is convincing you he doesn't exist." But what if his best trick is convincing you he does?