Pandemonium means bedlam, chaos or confusion. Does that sound like Sunday morning at your house?
If you know your Greek, pandemonium means daemonium (demons) and pan (all around). No matter where you are in your Christian journey, Satan is always ready to wreak havoc in your life just at the moment God is ready to do great things. Don’t go naked to church, or anywhere else for that matter. Be alert. Don’t get caught with your pants down.
On our first Easter Sunday morning in our very first church, pandemonium filled the parsonage. Roger, my young preacher-husband, was raring to go. He prayed for God to rain down fire from heaven. He practiced his sermon in the bathroom mirror until he was hoarse (hand gestures and all). He’d scraped dog poop off the bottoms of his brown wingtip dress shoes, and he flossed twice for good measure (no bacon bits hanging from his molars for Easter, a pastor’s “Superbowl Sunday”). Then my hero scurried off to the kitchen to grab a powdered-sugar donut on his way to church (an unwise move-the sugar residue resembles dandruff).
That’s when pandemonium ensued. Our two pudgie Dachshunds, Bootsie and Brother Barrier, eagerly greeted their Daddy, plastering him with four sets of gummy, muddy paws. Perturbed beyond belief, Roger raced to the sink, pulled out a blue SOS pad and frantically began to scrape the muddy pawprints from his cream polyester pants. Now his pants were bluish brown. This did not bode well for the morning ahead. Roger, screaming my name (not in a good way) noticed piles of green feathers littering the kitchen linoleum. Bootsie and Brother had obviously scarfed down Budgie, our pet parakeet, for breakfast while we were still sawing logs. Roger grabbed a nearby sponge to mop up Budgie’s remains and realized his garish green-feathered pants now resembled a Las Vegas show girl costume (only much more modest, of course). The pants had to go, so I threw some navy dockers on his behind, spritzed a little Calvin Klein to cover up the doggie smell and pointed him toward the door.
Our pandemonium had only begun. As Roger flung open the screen door to the carport, Bootsie and Brother exploded outside making a beeline into oncoming traffic. I sprinted after the errant wieners, lickety-split, completely forgetting I was wearing my quilted blue robe and electric rollers covered in toilet paper. Oh, yeah. And I forgot the white face cream. Classic. Most Sunday morning forays into the neighborhood would go unnoticed. But we lived on the main drag-a four lane boulevard three blocks from the church parking lot. All of our parishioners were giggling and waving at us, like we were the opening act for the service. Everything went downhill from there.
Two blocks later we captured our demon dachschunds and limped toward home. I heard the organist pumping out his version of “Up from the Grave He Arose” as Roger hightailed it across the church parking lot to slide into the service and catch his breath. Instead of quiet anticipation of God’s presence, pandemonium hit the fan.
Our first Sunday skirmish was nominal compared to the sieges that were to come. Hopefully, we learned to be better prepared. So don’t go naked to church, or anywhere else for that matter. Get prayed up. Suit up in your spiritual armor. The more God gets ready to bless your efforts, the more you will experience satanic interference. Don’t go blind into battle. Surround yourself with prayer warriors and stay alert. If you walk humbly before God, He will enable you to make peace out of pandemonium, create order out of chaos, and do mighty miracles in His name!