Deer in the Headlights

There’s a stretch of Old 40 between Abilene and Chapman that our household has come to know as Whitetail Alley. When you face another vehicle’s on-coming headlights there at night, it’s as long and straight and shiny-surfaced as a dark two-lane blacktop ever needs to be, and a generous portion of it passes directly between a tempting piece of crop ground and a safe riverside timber patch. The too-frequent car-deer altercations that have occurred in Whitetail Alley have not been deadly to any humans that I know of, which is undeniably a testimony to the intervening grace of God.

Heading back to Chapman after a recent evening meeting at church, I was very aware that the remaining daylight was rapidly fading… prime time for deer, and the most difficult time to see them. So I was really making an effort to do all the right things… keep the eyeballs moving, scan the ditches and the nearby fields, stay alert, pray for the Lord to set angels around me… but you drive here, too, you know the drill. And so, thankfully, I made it once again through the “danger zone” without incident. Just a couple of miles to go now, and you hardly EVER see deer between Chapman and that fallen-down old barn…

As I approached Indian Hill just outside of Chapman, I was thinking about something I had read earlier that day, a thought about how Satan often waits until we have achieved a small victory, then Wham! he slips one in and has a victory party of his own at our expense. And I peered into the purple dusk and there, not ten seconds ahead of me, right in the road, half-way up the hill where they had no business whatsoever, two barely discernable gray-tan shapes stood staring at my headlights.

Our adversary, we are told, often disguises himself as an angel of light, an easy costume for one named Lucifer, the Light-bearer. Whether he or his demonic minions ever disguise themselves as deer-wisps in an effort to cause an aspiring Christ-follower to overreact and maybe lose control of a fast-rolling vehicle on a narrow road next to a steep embankment, I don’t know, maybe so. Been there, done that, bought the radiator. Could have bought the farm, too, but not this time. No swerve, no screech, no collision. This time it was Whoa, not Wham.

So I dodged that one, a small victory. When do I expect the Wham? To be honest, I don’t. I do try to keep in mind the admonitions of Paul to devote myself to prayer with an alert mind and a thankful heart (Col. 4:2 NLT) and to be on my guard, not asleep, staying alert and clearheaded (1 Thess. 5:6 NLT), but I don’t get in a panic about it. My Lord and Savior never sleeps, and He has doubtlessly rescued me from many dangers I never saw at all. I’m sure He’s willing and able to do it again, and He will probably have to.

After all, I’m an aspiring Christ–follower. And I drive Whitetail Alley.