God Without Religion_ Can It Really Be This Simple_ - Andrew Farley [41]
Our first reaction was laughter, which soon turned into concern. How would we prove we didn’t make the calls? We certainly couldn’t afford to pay the bill!
We called the phone company, and they sent someone to investigate. When the telephone man arrived, we explained that we’d received a bill for calls we didn’t make. He asked to see the bill. After looking at it for a few seconds, he said, “You know, you can call the psychic hotline, and they’ll let you enter the day and time of the calls on your bill. Then you can hear their recording of the actual call.”
We grabbed the phone, dialed the hotline, and typed in the day and time of one call on our bill. “Chantal Abbott,” the lady on the recording said after the psychic asked for her name. And that’s all the hotline would let us hear—just the first fifteen seconds of the call. Then we punched in a few other days and times, and for each call we got the same name.
“It was some lady named Chantal Abbott,” I announced. The telephone man seemed intrigued and scurried off to do some checking around our house. A few minutes later, he came back. He hadn’t found anything but said he was headed down the street to where all the phone lines on our block come together.
“I’ll let you know what I find. This is fun!”
“Fun?” I wondered, “Maybe fun for him.” For us, the whole thing was bizarre and even a bit scary. By this time, we weren’t exactly settling in comfortably to South Bend culture.
The telephone man returned twenty minutes later with a gleam in his eyes and said, “I checked at the corner where all the lines come in. Sure enough, there’s something going on. There are notch marks in the telephone pole where someone has been climbing up pretty regularly. And when I climbed up, I saw that the insulation had been cut away from the bundle of phone lines, and it’s your line that is exposed. Apparently, someone’s been tapping into your line and making calls.”
“There’s more!” he said excitedly. “I noticed that one house near the pole didn’t have phone service, so I suspected they might be the ones tapping your line. Then I asked somebody walking by on the street if they knew who lived in that house. They didn’t know her last name but said her first name is Chantal.”
All of the calls were made late at night. Apparently, a lady named Chantal was climbing a telephone pole in the middle of the night. She was using some kind of spiked shoes to climb up, and then she was clamping into our phone line to call a psychic. Well, what better way is there to test the authenticity of a psychic? Just ask them, “Where am I right now?” as you’re suspended twenty feet in the air on a telephone pole!
The telephone man said he’d make sure the calls were removed from our bill. He also said we could report Chantal to the police, but we decided not to. As long as the charges were taken off the bill, we didn’t really care.
But the phone company must have cared. Within forty-eight hours, a moving truck had pulled up in front of that corner house and Chantal was nowhere to be found!
Perhaps she moved on the advice of the psychic?
Who’s Tapping Your Line?
I tell you this true story to demonstrate how easy it is for someone to infiltrate our lives and take over our lines of communication without us even realizing it. And the same thing can happen to us spiritually.
It’s easy for our minds to get tapped.
The result is “calls” that are not ours, even though they may sound just like us. The calls may tempt us to do things we know are wrong. The calls may run scenarios through our minds, offering suggestions on how to get payback for what someone did to us. Or the calls may flood us with fear as we entertain all the “what ifs” of life.
There’s a power called sin (hamartia in Greek) that actually dials in and does the talking. Sin is cold and calculated in its attempt to sway us. It’s a crafty agent that clamps on to our lines, placing all kinds of calls. These calls fill us with religious pride, or make us worry about our future, or get us