Chaplain Corner Submissions - Ben Caudill Chaplain's Corner

SNAKE IN THE TRUNK

Once upon a time there was a man who had been working around his house cleaning up the yard. He raked, cleaned, and piled all the debris in a box. He decided to go get something to eat and relax for a moment from the summer sun. When he returned to his work he was able to finish cleaning the yard and he decided to place the two boxes of trash into his trunk.

The next morning he took the boxes to the local dumpster. Upon reaching for the last box he noted something moving. To his dismay he saw that it was a copperhead. Being fearful of the snake, he decided to leave it in the trunk and let it die of heat or starvation. Little did he know that the snake had found a small opening in the firewall of the trunk and made its way into the floorboard of the vehicle.

That afternoon, his wife needed some groceries and told her husband to go to the store and purchase them. He went with the notion that he would place all the groceries in the back seat and not open the trunk. This winter he would find the remains of the snake. He shopped and finally got all the items on his wife’s grocery list. He pushed the loaded buggy to his car and opened up the back door. He started loading the items in the back seat. He bent over to put the cartoon of milk and bread in the floorboard when he felt a sharp bite on his face. The copperhead that he chose not to remove or kill that had been in his trunk had bit him.

I recall loading a couple of boxes from a shed with my young son by my side. I left the trunk open and went back for the final load. My son started yelling for me to come quickly look in the box. He stated that there was a black widow spider in it. I thought that it might be a spider but he was too young to recognize a widow. When I looked into the box, sure enough there was a black widow meandering across the items I had just placed in the trunk. I immediately grabbed an object a smashed the spider completely. I was proud of my son being able to recognize danger and glad that he witnessed how to deal with danger.

Friend we have choices in life. We can carry in our back pocket a snake or a spider knowing that it isn’t a matter of if it will bite you but one of when it will bite. Satan is the snake in the trunk. You can choose to face the evil, resist it and have it flee from you or you can simply ignore it and hope that it goes away or dies. The Bible says in 1 John 4:4, “Greater is He who is in me, than he that is in the world.” Romans 12:21 states, “I am the body of Christ and satan has no power over me. I overcome evil with good.” No evil can overcome you when you resist. James 4:7 confirms that fact: “The devil flees from me because I resist him in Jesus's Name.”

Yet we still walk around with a truck full of snakes and spiders when all we have to do is rebuke them, slay them in the name of Jesus and let them depart from us. When the Lord is the light unto your path, you will find that your feet follow the correct path. Refuse to give place to the devil (Ephesians 4:27) and kill those snakes in your trunk! Wearing snake proof armor, I remain the old general