At the Crossroads

"Of course you may be too much of a fool to go wrong - too dull even to know you are being assaulted by the powers of darkness. I take it, no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil: the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too much of a devil - I don't know which."

Joseph Conrad put these words down on paper when he wrote The Heart of Darkness. My mind wanders now over the crossroad instances of history. There have been many of them. Faust met with Mephistopheles. The devil met with Tom Walker. He also met with Young Goodman Brown. He even met with Daniel Webster. There have been, throughout literary history, repeated occasions for devilish encounters. In the jazz tradition this has been known as a "crossroads experience." The devil will meet his client at the X in the road to carry on his business. But the devil is, as Conrad noted, very much a devil. He is devilishly devilish. He doesn't waste his time on foolish business (yes, the pun is intended). The fool, according to the Psalms, says there is no God. Fools are already part of his system. The unsaved fool belongs to him entirely, whereas the saved fool (of which I am often one) is his because of the trap in which the fool has fallen. Both can of course be released. They can be set free. Yet the devil is more concerned, I believe, with those that are not his, or at least in his traps. He is worried about the ones that present a potential risk. The dangerous ones. Those that interfere the most in his plans. Those would be also the ones that are interfered with the most in their own plans by God's great plans. The devil is after the ones that are more powerful. Sometimes we think of those as the public personas. You know, the Grahams, or Pipers, or other such popular ones. That's true, he is after those. But he is also after the less public ones. Being public or not does not denote power. I've met many a prayer warrior who spent more time locked up in their closet for prayer than behind a pulpit preaching. Both are equally powerful - therefore both are equally prey to the devils strategies.