Dear Father, I read through Tamar's story again, and I noticed how one painful event led to another. After she was raped, the Scripture records that, "Tamar remained desolate..." Rape and desolation! A painful, recurring truth: evil left unchecked has a way of multiplying itself. I pondered the many situations in life where one negative occurrence automatically gives rise to another, especially when the first seems beyond our control. We come across situations where the loss of a loved one leads a person into overwhelming grief. We see failure give way to discouragement, rejection to insecurity, addiction to captivity, delay to frustration, sin to isolation, and depression to hopelessness. Perhaps we can all relate to shifting problems: what we once thought would linger for only a while has now grown beyond our control and has taken on a different name. How do we solve the new problem when we have not yet experienced victory over where it first began? How do we prevent one affliction from giving rise to another? While there are many issues listed here for which solutions cannot be offered in a single letter to You, I'd like to state the obvious. Shifting evil first thrives in ignorance. Like weeds left untended, it multiplies when left unchecked, and it prevails when we confront it without engaging in spiritual warfare. Too often, we make the recurring mistake of waiting it out, unaware of its tendency to multiply. By the time we rise to confront it, we often forget that every work of destruction begins in darkness-- and darkness is dispelled only by light. Translations; Slide 1: English Slide 2: French Slide 3: Bengali Slide 4: Hindu Slide 5: Urdu #LettertoGod #light #darkness #ignorance #evil