The smell of burnt tires on the asphalt hit my nose as I coughed and choked on the smoke that was filling up my car. My ears still ringing from the impact, I stared intently at the airbag in front of me trying to comprehend what it was. Oh, my airbag went off.
A few weeks earlier:
It was one of those dreams where every detail was so realistic that you felt like you were almost reliving a memory –a memory that had never happened.
He was trying to kill me. His sole purpose for existing was to destroy my life. He tried to get near me but couldn’t ever get close enough, so he thought he’d torment me with fear by hanging a dead body in a room in my house and sending me text messages informing me that he was going to kill me. But even though in my dream those things disturbed me, I remember yelling out scriptures like “Greater is He that is in me, than he that is in the world.” I wasn’t afraid and when he finally showed his face I began to rebuke the spirit of death and murder in Jesus name and when I did that he started screaming “Why can’t I kill you? I just want to kill you!” I replied, “Because Jesus won’t let you.” And then I woke up.
Sunday Oct 30, 2011:
The topic of the sermon that morning was “The Day Death Died.” It was about breaking your contract with death –Isaiah 28:18 “Your covenant with death will be annulled, and your agreement with hell will not stand.” I left church that day feeling that whatever agreements I had made with death –whether it was giving into insecurity, shame, or condemnation, my agreement had been broken. I left free.
Later that afternoon:
My sister placed the glass 13×9 casserole dish on the burner and turned it on assuring me that this is what she saw her mother-in-law do the day before when she made chicken. I thought it was strange but didn’t think too much about it as I turned to the counter and began cutting vegetables as my sister stood in front of the sink. As we were about to turn around and put the food into the pan there was a loud explosion and shards of glass went flying everywhere –over every surface in the kitchen, on top of every counter, all over the floor, even reaching out into the living room –yet not one shard touched either of us and we were standing three feet away from it. I looked down at my bare feet and there was a perfect ring around them that had no glass. It was impossible for the glass to have missed us.
Thursday evening, driving down Highway 51:
I get onto the highway and notice that the flow of traffic is extremely different than normal, to my right I catch a glance of a car on fire on an exit ramp. What is going on? I move to the far right lane because I’m two exits away from my exit when all of the sudden the car in front me slams on their breaks and swerves halfway to the right to avoid what surprised them as completely stopped traffic on the highway. There wasn’t even enough time for me to react. It happened a lot faster than I can describe, I slam on my breaks, swerve to the left to avoid them –I hear the sound of my car barely swipe the back left bumper of the car that was in front of me, and then collide into the back of a truck that was completely at a stop. The smell of burnt tires on the asphalt hit my nose as I coughed and choked on the smoke that was filling up my car. My ears still ringing from the impact, I stared intently at the airbag in front of me trying to comprehend what it was. Oh, my airbag went off. I’m fine. I’m fine.
I walked away from the accident with an unsightly air bag burn under my chin and a few bruises on my arm where I stopped the airbag from hitting my face. The guy I hit didn’t speak English and looked at his dented bumper and drove away. The car whose bumper I swiped, it literally only took a foot of paint off and nothing else. However, the passenger side of my car didn’t fare as well… I’m praying the mechanic looking at it on Monday can raise the dead.
These past few weeks I’ve definitely felt the warfare over my life.
“Why can’t I kill you? I just want to kill you!”
Because Jesus won’t let you.
