After the Philistines had captured the ark of God, they took it from Ebenezer to Ashdod. Then they carried the ark into Dagon's temple and set it beside Dagon. When the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, there was Dagon, fallen on his face on the ground before the ark of the Lord! They took Dagon and put him back in his place. But the following morning when they rose, there was Dagon, fallen on his face on the ground before the ark of the Lord! His head and hands had been broken off and were lying on the threshold; only his body remained. (1 Samuel 5:1-4)
2025 has been a challenging year right from the start – with a variety of issues and battles thrown our way, one after the other. From a work perspective, it hasn’t been much better – I’ve been assisting with a project that by the time it’s over will likely be the second worst I’ve ever been on (only to be eclipsed by the project detailed in 2004 in "Just Ask Me").
At the beginning of March, the forecast only got worse as one of the partners of the company asked that I cover for him for 10 days (sadly, that man does a lot of work). Well today is the last day of that 10-day stretch. I knew it was going to be awful, but it was much worse than that. There were stretches this past week, where I was literally getting pinged by email or Slack every minute. Just as I was scrambling to put out one fire, some horrific new one would start up.
I barely spent any time this week with Dee at all and my conversations with her were usually brief, “please pray for me”. Thursday morning, knowing I was really in bad shape, she came down to my work office and dropped off a little figurine of a smiling Jesus that reads “Jesus loves you”. She took a minute or two to figure out the best place to put it and ultimately decided to put it right on the top of my monitor where she knew it would be most visible.
A few hours later, as I was working to put out one of the aforementioned fires, a colleague made a really bad mistake and made a situation that I was on the cusp of resolving, so much worse. Utterly exasperated, I reached to grab my head in disbelief and accidentally hit my elbow on my desk on the way back down. When I did so, the Jesus figurine went flying and landed perfectly face down on the middle of my keyboard.
I started bursting out laughing with a laughter that hasn’t permeated from me like that in all my decades. You see a day or two earlier in my daily bible reading, I just so happened to come across this passage from 1 Samuel where the Philistines made a foolish blunder with the ark of God…and they proceeded to watch their god Dagon quickly find himself face down on the floor.
I knew instantly I was having one of my emergency God moments, where He knew I was in desperate trouble, and mercifully decided to reach out from heaven and let me know He was there. That figurine could have landed in any one of a myriad of ways (on its back, on its side, somewhere completely out of my vision, etc.), but no, it landed perfectly face down right in the middle of my keyboard.
After I finished laughing for about two minutes, I picked up that figurine and propped it up a little higher than it was before so I wouldn’t accidentally knock it off again. When I did, I was greeted with its big smile, but it seemed so much wider and brighter than what it looked like to me when Dee brought it down.
Although the rest of the work week was still brutal, ever since that moment, my demeanor was so much better and I was able to carry a spirit of thanksgiving...knowing that when times are at their worst, I can count on as fact that I have a loving Savior always ready to pick me up and put back all of my pieces.