In late September of 2012, my email got hacked. I know that’s when it happened because I wrote a blog post about it back then. Well, here we are over seven years later and they got me again.

This time it was my own stupidity that hurt me. A few weeks ago I received an email saying that my email account was about to be deleted. Assuming the whole thing to be a scam, I ignored it. A few weeks later I received the same type of email and again ignored it. Okay, so far so good. But a couple days ago I received a similar type of email, except this one said “Your email account has been deleted.”

I’ll admit that pronouncement threw a scare into me, and so I clicked on the link. Supposedly, in order to get back into my email and update it, I had to put in my username and password. Yep, that’s where I messed up. Once they had my password, they sent their chain email to all of my contacts. The email said that I was traveling and that my niece needed some money, so could you please…. You get the idea.

I offer my sincere apologies to anyone who received that email from me. One friend of mine even replied back to me and said, “How much do you need?” God bless him for that. Another dear lady called me on the phone and asked me about the situation. God bless here as well. Other friends either emailed me or texted me with, “I think you’ve been hacked.”

Let me ask you something, what kind of criminal masterminds sit around and cook up these schemes? As my brother Richie said, “They’ll work hard on something like that but won’t go out and get a real job.” I’m telling you it’s sin, pure and simple, nothing but sin.  There’s even a commandment that addresses the matter: Thou shalt not steal. That refers to stealing money, and it also refers to stealing email passwords.

Of course all of this is simply a reminder that we live in a fallen world. Honestly, I don’t know how God puts up with it. I know a thimble full of the evil that goes on in this world, but He knows the entire ocean of it. And yet here we are, still going through the motions of daily life and all the sins that get committed as part of it. Talk about a God who is merciful and longsuffering!

I’m not sure that I have a point to this post other than to vent some of my frustration at the state of society these days. I live in mortal terror of answering a strange number on my cell phone because it might be a telemarketer. As we all know, if you ever answer one of those numbers it won’t be long before you get blitzed with a lot more of them. When I buy anything online I use my credit card rather than my debit card because our bank offers more protection for credit-card scam than it does debit-card scam. Isn’t it sad that there are actually scams for both types of cards? I constantly have to check the spam in my email account because I’ve learned that sometimes comments made to this blog get dumped into my spam rather than my email. But why do I get hit with so much spam anyway? How I long for simpler times when Spam was nothing more than the cousin of Treat, both of them being stuff you could use to make a sandwich, like potted meat or devil’s ham.

Anyway, I guess I’ll close by saying that my recent experience with my email has made me long for heaven just a little bit more. I think we can all rest assured that nobody will get hacked there. But until we get there, Christians, we’d better keep our shields up. The devil is still walking around like a roaring lion seeking whom he can devour (1 Peter 5:8), and he’s still finding plenty of volunteers who will gladly do his work. Some of those volunteers hacked my email account this week. I wonder if they’ve ever thought about whose bidding they are doing. The chances are they haven’t, but that doesn’t make their sin any less excusable in God’s eyes.