The Grocery Store at Mile Twenty

In 2018, ultramarathon runner Courtney Dauwalter was thirty hours into the Moab 240 — a grueling 240-mile race across the Utah desert. Her body screamed for calories. Her vision was blurring. And then, at an aid station, someone offered her a chair.

It wasn't the desert heat that nearly broke her. It was the chair. The small, reasonable, perfectly justified invitation to sit down and rest. She later told interviewers that the most dangerous temptations on the course never looked like quitting. They looked like comfort — a warm blanket, a few extra minutes off her feet, a "smart" decision to slow down. Each one, taken alone, seemed wise. Together, they would have ended her race.

When the devil came to Jesus in the wilderness, he didn't open with anything absurd. He opened with bread for a starving man. He offered political power to someone who would eventually wear a crown of thorns. He suggested a spectacular display for someone whose Father had just declared Him beloved. Every temptation was a shortcut to something Jesus would ultimately receive — but through suffering, not surrender.

That is how temptation still works. It rarely announces itself as rebellion against the Almighty. It arrives dressed as pragmatism, as self-care, as the sensible next step. The enemy's sharpest tools are not the things we would never do — they are the good things offered at the wrong time, through the wrong door.

Jesus answered each one not with willpower, but with Scripture. He knew who He was, and whose He was. And the devil left — for a season.