Game On

I got mad at the devil this evening.

Allow me to explain:

As pretty much everyone reading this knows (and if you don't, you're in for a shocker), my wife Christen passed away on January 9. What most people don't know is what has continued to transpire in my more extended family since then. I'll give you both the good and the bad so that you have a more complete picture.

On the good side, my family's spiritual vitality since Christen's passing has been at an all-time high. Frankly speaking, Christen's funeral service was a wake-up call to a few members of my family, namely my brother and one of my cousins. My brother has become nothing short of prolific in his writing about Christianity from the perspective of someone who's been asleep for awhile and has recently awoken, only to find that the world is far more interesting than the dream he was having while asleep. If you want to read some of his thoughts, I'd highly encourage checking out his blog, aptly named Cromulent Thoughts (any Simpsons fans reading this will understand that reference). He puts up weekly posts, and while they have some length to them, they are worth the read (and I don't say that flippantly).

On the bad side, there have been some additional medical issues that have arisen within my family. My grandpa, who is in his mid-80s and has been suffering from Parkinson's for the past decade or more, slipped and fell a few weeks back, hitting his head and necessitating a visit to the ER, a trip down to Peoria for a few days, and now a few weeks in a nursing home while he goes through some physical therapy. He will likely be back home in a few days, but that put the family on alert again. Additionally, just this past week, my dad got up in the middle of the night and essentially passed out a few times before he ended up in the ER. He'd been having some stomach troubles for a little while, but it ended up being more serious than anyone thought - he has a bleeding ulcer. He was in the hospital for a few days, returning home just this evening (as I write, it's Sunday, April 1). All of this is just on the medical side of things.

Before I go any further, let me be clear about something: I am not writing all of this to complain. I am not writing all of this to elicit sympathy or pity. I am most definitely not writing this to attract attention to me or my family.

I am writing this because this evening I got a glimpse into the enemy's strategy, and I got mad about it. Real mad. And not like a 'gosh, I wish you would leave me alone' kind of mad. More like a 'seriously, that's how you want to do this?' kind of mad. I got mad because he's a liar and a schemer and a deceiver. I got mad because, as one trying to fight the good fight (literally, war the good warfare), I recognized that one of his strategies was to overwhelm me into silence.

It must be understood that I don't necessarily believe that all the events that took place were aimed at me. I think there are plans of God and schemes of Satan that are far more complex than that, taking into account all the lives involved and their respective reactions to different situations. I do, however, believe that Satan has a particular strategy for how I process all of the events that have transpired. His goal has been to keep the shots coming until I've dug myself in so deep I don't want to come out. That I get so entrenched in all the stuff happening and take my eyes off of the bigger picture and the larger plans God has designed. Effectively, that I take my eyes off of Him entirely and stare fixedly at the walls of my fox-hole. I realized all of this tonight, and I realized that I had fallen into that trap. And I got mad.

You see, this is a war, not a battle. In a battle, you have to have good tactics in order to win. You have to have the right formation, the right timing, the right terrain, the right discipline. Anyone can win a battle under the right circumstances. In a war, however, you have to have the best strategy in order to win. It means you know the battles you can lose, the positions from which you can fall back, but also where you must hold and advance in order to win the whole war.

I've been focused on battles going on around me and lost sight of the war. In this, I had lost my passion for the things Christen and I had spent countless hours discussing and planning. I didn't realize, until tonight, that this is precisely how Satan wants me to respond to these circumstances. I have been on the defensive, as it were, reeling from one attack after another, trying to 'hold it together' while I retreated further and further into the immediacy of my life. In taking it 'one day at a time', I ended up allowing each day to hit me, focusing more on surviving it rather than thriving in it.

Jesus says that He will build His Church, 'and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18).' That's a statement of attack. To be at the gates is to be storming the very stronghold of an enemy. The Church storms the strongholds of hell, tearing them down with weapons not of this world (2 Corinthians 10:4). Jesus is the 5-star General of this war, and it's His strategy that's already broken the back of Satan - the plan He and the Father planned out before the foundations of the world, that He would come, live as a man, do so perfectly, die unjustly yet sacrificially, rise powerfully, and save people graciously, mercifully, and lovingly. In doing this, the war was won. What I lost sight of is the fact that the victory has already been obtained in Jesus. Oh! what a victory! We, the Church, have the privilege of now moving into enemy territory, not as fearful civilians constantly on the defensive, but as 'more than conquerors', destroying the enemy's strongholds as we go and seeing those bound up in his dungeons loosed from their chains and set free - only to join in the constant advance of Christ and His Church.

I titled this post 'Game On', but I do not believe this is in any way a game. It is war. It is life and death. Satan has won some battles recently in my life, but in executing his clever tactics, he exposed his strategy and, by God's grace, I have seen the weakness in it. Satan is a formidable foe, to be sure, and one that I cannot defeat in my own strength or cleverness. In Christ, however, I can see him overcome and overthrown in my life and seek the same in the lives of others.

I recognize that I did not go into specifics regarding what was revealed to me this evening. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be writing more about the things Christen and I had been thinking through prior to her passing. It was our hope to see these things come to pass in the next year or two. In God's providence, that timeline has been thrown off course. I believe this will only strengthen what will come next. Armed with greater understanding, I will begin to think through (again) what she and I were working on. You will begin to see more posts over the coming weeks and months regarding particular church-y buzz words like 'mission', 'community', 'discipleship', 'evangelism', and the like. In reengaging these topics, I believe I will be getting out of my fox-hole and joining in the on-going destruction of strongholds as Jesus builds His Church.