Paul warns us not to be “outwitted by Satan. For we are not ignorant of his devices” (2 Corinthians 2:11). But I was ignorant of at least one of his devices until one day last week.

When you are unexpectedly hunkered down in a hospital waiting room from 8:23 to 11:45 a.m. because the radiologist, not satisfied with the first set of mammograms, insists on another immediately; and when you have brought no interesting reading material; and when you are in an altered state of consciousness anyway because of the second set of mammograms thing; your situation has all the ingredients for revealing one of Satan’s devices.

As I sit there, I think, some of us detainees in the powder-blue gowns will get bad news today perhaps. “Teach me to number my days that I might have a heart of wisdom” has been one of my daily prayers for months, but I am still hoping it will be answered in a theoretical way.

The room is unusually packed and I scan the company. Let me reemphasize that we have nothing at all to do while waiting. And since this is Philadelphia and not Kansas, we don’t even talk to each other particularly. If ever there was a time to think about one’s mortality this is it. But instead, as the women come in, each picks up a gossip magazine and thrums through idly.

I am an idle thrummer with the best of them, though this morning I’m not into it. For some reason I am thinking of all the worthless things I have said in my lifetime. And I am reckoning hard with a new epiphany— that one of the most un-talked about and perhaps under-the-radar devices of Satan is that he has as little to do to trip us into hell as to fill our minds with a stream of banal thoughts.

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