A Spiritual Attack or a Coincidence?

About 2 weeks ago, I decided to start going out with my cross on my own. Prior to that, I had only gone places with my pastor or where he had something set up (a prayer station). It was about that time that I made a commitment to God that if I heard a blasphemy on a TV show that I would change the channel. I cut the cable a few months ago, but I am amazed at how much garbage is even on the network channels. Needless to say, I don't watch much TV anymore.

I will watch the news with my wife occasionally and perhaps Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, but I heard a blasphemy even on Jeopardy the other day. My rule has to been to turn off that particular episode- not ban the entire show, although come 8:00 PM, I turn to the Bible for the next two hours. I wasn't sure if it was because I was just so tuned in to listening for the blasphemies, but I found my brain repeating the blasphemies I heard and soon anytime I heard someone say "Oh my.." my brain would fill in the rest- even if they didn't take the Lord's name in vain.

Then I expanded my blasphemy ban to curse worse and included the radio. So now my brain was tuned into both blasphemies and curse words. Before I knew it, my brain was combining the Lord's name and curse words together whenever I even thought of our Heavenly Father's name.

A big problem I had with this was that this was a new issue that popped up in my life- it wasn't a pre-existing sinful state that I had failed to repent of. I never really blasphemed before I was saved, so having this play out in my mind makes this all the more troublesome. I have struggled with this for about two weeks, and recently I've gained a lot of control over it- mostly by just not thinking about it. I realized the more I thought about it, the worse the situation got. I don't want to be blaspheming, but thinking about it or replaying situations where it was done can cause my mind to do it, so the best thing was just to stop thinking about it.

Last night, I decided on a location to go to in Lakewood to display my cross. It would be the first time alone with the cross on a street. I also decided I was going to read from Scripture. Right after I made those two decisions, my neck started to hurt- out of nowhere. This morning, I had trouble even lifting my head off the pillow. I think these occurrences are more than just coincidences.

Once I started moving around, my neck started to feel better, but it still hurts. I wasn't going to let it get the best of me, though, and I still headed out to Lakewood Park to join my pastor and I did end up finding a new fishing hole! More on that later!