This week, I decided a perfect way to motivate myself to be faithful to write my own blog would be to offer a free weekly devotional thought. After all, everyone says you should blog about something that's helpful to others and about which you are passionate. So, Jesus, it is.
This is the first of what I hope will be many FRIDAY FREE-votions. Of course, if you're reading this (unless it's next week already), you've noticed that it's not Friday. Sigh. Let's be blunt -- I was scrambling to hit deadliness for clients and let my own stuff slip (remember my first post and that whole story of the painter with the peeling house?). So, let's just call it the FRIDAY-ish FREE-votions and, without further ado...
Gotta say Acts 16:16-18 has always been one of the strangest stories in Scripture for me. In case you don't want to look it up, the Cliff's Notes go like this: A demon-possessed slave girl who made lots of money for her owners by telling fortunes follows Paul and Co. around shouting "These men are servants of the Most High God who are telling you the way to be saved." Paul eventually decides he's had enough, get annoyed, and casts the demon out of the girl, earning himself a trip to the pokey, courtesy of the owners who found themselves short one income stream. Now, here's a short list of what never made sense to me:
*Why would a demon want to give the apostles free advertising like that? *Why was Paul annoyed? None of us are perfect, but shouldn't he, if anything, have been moved to compassion for the girl?
*Whatever happened to the girl (actually, this one's buzzing around in my head as possible fodder for a novel)
My take -- and I'm still squinting my eyes and cocking my head, trying to juice the story for a little more -- is that God sometimes uses irritants to get us to do the right things we might not otherwise do. I can definitely attest that the truth, coming out of the mouth of the "wrong" person can be annoying (and, no, I'm totally not talking about my wife here). But annoying or not, shouldn't Paul and Co.'s first thought be to cast the demon out of the girl, not because she was irritating them but, well, because the girl was demon possessed and needed to be free.
I wonder if there are times when our irritation is God's way of motivating us to do something we should be doing for purer motives. What do you think?