11 Days... Letter 5 from El Diablo

If you are not familiar with the style of writing used in C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters, read this post first!

Last year, a mission team intercepted the following communications regarding their trip to Mexico. It appears to be from Diablo to a younger devil, trying to attack and derail the mission team... We better take note that we don't fall into some of the same traps they tried on this team...

from: sr_diablo@hell.net
to: lucifrito@sector6.mex
date: April 20 subject: Failure

Lucifrito,

You incompetent fool. Not only have you allowed the villagers to join the missioners in the construction of the church, you have also allowed Jerry to learn enough of the local language that he has been able to work side-by-side with the villagers.
Even worse, in the course of the budding relationship with a local carpenter, he appears to have even stopped hammering long enough to listen to some of the villagers' own hopes and dreams. How could you have allowed the villagers to actually come to have a degree of ownership over this ill-conceived construction project? How, once again, have you allowed the Enemy to turn something that we should so easily have been able to exploit for our good, or at least happily neutralize, for His own Purposes?

Let this group travel year after year to different sites in the name of "gaining new experiences" rather than committing themselves in any kind of significant partnership with the villagers over years or (Our Father forbid) decades.

Furthermore I see Amber and Kelly have spent the week developing a genuine friendship with some of the local teenage boys, one built around their mutual (though fortunately nascent) love for the Enemy, rather than the skin under their clothes (I have noted your failure regarding the tank-top and cut-off suggestion). I get heartburn thinking of the innocent joy these teenagers experienced when leading a game of "duck-duck-goose" with the littlest humans in the village. All of this on the most depressing of all days in the year, when that wretched Son of the Enemy somehow . . . never mind.

At this point, the best you must do is to ensure that this relationship is one-off. Let this group travel year after year to different sites in the name of "gaining new experiences" rather than committing themselves in any kind of significant partnership with the villagers over years or (Our Father forbid) decades. This will keep any future experiences pleasantly superficial and relatively harmless. Obviously, the worst case scenario would be for a long-term commitment in which both parties struggle side-by-side through a close partnership with one another and the Enemy.

I will monitor the situation, and if such eventualities come to pass, I will see to it that the patrol of Sector 6 is entrusted to a spirit with higher levels of temptoral competence, and that you are re-assigned to inciting food-fights in a pre-school cafeteria.

Disappointed in the Extreme,

Diablo

This post is taken from an article from Christianity Today by Bruce Wydick.