Chapter 1 – The Mind is the Battlefield

Battlefield of the Mind: Winning the Battle in Your Mind by Joyce Meyer

Chapter 1 – The Mind is the Battlefield

Once upon a time, there was a little girl. When she was 5 years old, her mother took her onto her bed and into her arms and told her that she was going to get a job. The little girl would be staying with a neighbor half a day, riding a bus to kindergarten for the afternoon and coming home to a napping father. Her mother was missing.

When she was 6 years old, she and her mother moved out of the trailer and into an apartment in a dangerous neighborhood. The girl stayed by herself in the morning until the clock told her it was time to walk the long block to the corner to wait for the school bus. She came home to an empty house. Her father was missing.

By the time she was 12 years old there was a new father – not her own – and two new babies – who took up all of her parents time. But more memorable – that was the year the bullying started. Every girl in her 6^th grade class save one would sit around the locker room and throw out all the reasons that the girl was worthless. Her friends were missing.

The teacher bullied her too. Adult support was missing.

She was a disappointment at home. Parental support was missing.

She didn’t want to be anywhere. Nowhere was a safe place. She was alone.

All her life the little girl had feelings of abandonment. She felt alone in a large world. She felt she had to rely upon her self – be self sufficient. Who else could she trust?

When she would start to get comfortable, start to trust her environment, it would happen again. Someone would go missing.

The little girl always wondered why she wasn’t good enough for anyone to stick around.

Satan has been working on this little girl for a very long time. He is patient. He is a planner. And he has set up strongholds in her mind. He knows how to push her buttons. He knows exactly what to say. She so easily buys into his words.

The battlefield is her mind and she is losing. The war is not with the flesh. It is with the spiritual realm – that which she cannot see. So it is very easy for her to believe that she is alone.

She’s been taught from infancy that she belongs to Jesus. She has always belonged to a church. She attended a Christian school. She knows all of the right answers.

But the war wages on …

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers,
against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
Ephesians 6:12 (ESV)