No atheists in a foxhole

They say there are no atheists in foxholes, but it’s not precisely true, of course. Our best authority on this is Scripture itself where we read that the fifth angel’s bowl of pains and sores poured out on many humans will not be met with repentance but with a cursing of God (Revelation 16:9).

More contemporarily, Saul Alinsky (who dedicated his book Rules for Radicals to Lucifer), two months before his death in 1972, gave an interview to Playboy in which he said, “[I]f there is an afterlife, and I have anything to say about it, I will unreservedly choose to go to hell. … Hell would be heaven for me. … They’re my kind of people.” (Although that may be a poor example because the man didn’t know he was in a foxhole. A sudden massive heart attack claimed him on a city street.)

But recently I accompanied my neighbor J.P. and her family to the hospital at 5:30 a.m. for a three-hour operation to remove a cancerous tumor and to be fitted with a colostomy bag. I have been her neighbor for 28 years but we have not talked about God much. There has been little interest on her part and little courage on mine.

But in the last few months since J.P.’s diagnosis, she has offered no resistance to prayer and has thanked me for any number of drop-down-in-the-kitchen-and-pray moments. It all makes me think that death—the Enemy’s last indignity, and an Enemy itself that will be once and for all thrown into the lake of fire along with its companion Hades (Revelation 20:14)—is also God’s “last chance” service station on the road for saving souls. Not that J.P. will certainly die of this disease, but there is something about the strong possibility of it that clears the sinuses.

We Christians are to:

“Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter” (Proverbs 24:11, ESV).

So that morning in the OR prep room around J.P.’s bed, with her husband and two daughters, surrounded by an anesthesiologist, a doctor, nurses, and admissions people with clipboards extracting last-minute signatures, I leaned over J.P. and asked one last time if we could pray. There was no resistance and much comfort on her end, and her husband declared to all attendants that I am good at praying.

As I had ended my prayer in the name of Jesus, the husband did feel compelled afterward to regale the rushing orderlies with a joke about a burglar, pit bull, and a parrot named Jesus, but that is because he is an incorrigible jokester. Nevertheless, it was I, and not a family member, who was last to address J.P. before her surgery. And this never would have happened, I believe, if she had not been standing in a foxhole.