It’s Satan’s favorite month. The time that those in baseball have long referred to as the “dog days.” It's when most of the on-field fights happen.

You’re tired and on your last nerves during a season that—in many cases—hasn’t gone the way you planned. Even if your team is winning, it’s still tough to get as motivated to go outside and perform at a high level because, by now, everyone is playing with an injury or two. The games are still important, but it’s not quite playoff time. By now you’ve had so many at-bats that even if you get five hits in a day you’re lucky to see your batting average rise more than a single point.

If you want proof that August is our most dangerous, evil month, just turn your air conditioner off for a few hours. It’s hot as hell, but that annoying heat can manifest itself in bigger, more damaging ways. By August’s end the heat of the entire season has ingrained itself so deeply into our weather systems that this period routinely sees a higher number of devastating storms than any other point in the year.

Spiritually speaking, August is no vacation either, and if you don't believe that spirituality is seasonal you obviously haven't believed in God for too long. It feels too late to start anything new in August. If the summer was a good one you can’t possibly make it any better because time is so short. If the summer wasn’t great you’re cursed with even more time to sweat and stew in your failures.

If John Lennon was right, and “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,” then evil is what happens to us while we’re not busy at all. The most evil act humanity ever committed was when Adam stood silently and watched Eve fall to Satan’s trickery. Adam’s failure, passivity and inaction is the worst kind of sin. It's the one Satan seeks to force on us as often as he can, because it opens the door to every other kind of evil. A singular idleness can plague someone in August because of the combination of seasonal and weather-induced fatigue, apathy and despair for a summer that always feels like it could’ve gone better.

Maybe you’ve read all this and are still wondering why August has gotten such a bad rap. Maybe you’re the kind of person who wakes up every day feeling as refreshed and happy about what lies ahead as you do on Christmas morning. Or maybe you’ve not yet reached the August of your life.

America is filled with people who get to this point in the year and decide that their 8-month quest for personal renewal or glory has failed, and they just decide to bag the whole thing. They see that they’ve gone this deep into the season and are still stuck in fourth place, so they begin trading away all their best players out of shame and self-pity.

August is the stormy moment in every movie about life transformation where the main character falls to his knees and begs for a sign, or just some ray of hope to get him on his feet again. What we must understand, in reality, is that these unfortunate moments when we hit that worst kind of rock bottom, when our temper flares to this extreme of a level, when we fully lose sight of our intended goals, and the happiness with which we originally pursued them, are not God’s fault.

Credit for this kind of hopelessness is owed to the only true prince of this world: Satan. The evil one. The one who tells you it’s not worth getting out of bed. The one who kept you idle enough in the sun to burn you with what was intended to merely keep you warm. The one telling you that you’ve wasted the best parts of the year, or your life, and from here on out the days are only going to grow shorter.

And again, maybe you’ll listen to him. Maybe you’ve lost interest in walking through the fire (not to mention the humidity) to reach the goals you set for yourself while winter’s snows were melting. Maybe you allow the darkness of evil to encroach upon you as you run away from the joy with which you once viewed life. Or maybe you’ll stand and fight as the light in August, the month that evil knows it strategically must claim…or else.

Or else we’ll turn Satan’s favorite month into the moment we find our second wind, another dose of hope, a resolve that launches us through the rest of the seemingly endless season and provides us enough momentum to taste the victory awaiting us once the leaves have fallen!

Like everything else God truly values, he leaves the choices up to us, His finest creation. The same question has a way of weaving its way into our minds every single year.

Will this August, this rough patch, this moment of doubt, exhaustion and aimlessness be remembered as the month that slowly brought you to your knees, or the first time that you decided to stand back up?

Ben Verdi is a man with a Bible, a laptop and a nasty curveball. He can be reached at jetboiz@aol.com