Chapter 4 – Little by Little

“Discouragement destroys hope, so naturally the devil always tries to discourage us. Without hope we give up, which is what the devil wants us to do.”

When I read that I realized I had lost hope. Not hope in my eternal future, but hope in my earthly life. I’ve been living in discouragement for far too long, but I hadn’t identified it that way.

I have trained. I have prepared. I have studied. I have worked. I have put in the time. I have gone above and beyond. I have paid my way. I have asked. I have offered. I have suggested. I have shared. I have been generous. I have waited. I have waited. I have waited. I have waited.

I have trained some more. I have prepared some more. I have studied some more. I have worked harder. I have put in more time. I have gone higher and farther. I have paid more. I have asked again. I have offered again. I have suggested again. I have shared to the point of vulnerability. I have been obscenely generous. I have waited. I have waited. I have waited. I have waited.

It would be different if I could have an answer. Any answer would do. Something! An inkling. It’s the silence that puts me on the edge of madness. And I’m getting silence from all directions. Please, a hint of direction? I cannot continue like this. Stuck. Waiting. What if I’m waiting for something that will never come?

What does this have to do with my mind and the battlefield and little by little? Well this is a picture of the battlefield that is my mind. That’s me in the trench waiting for my orders. I’ve been hunkered there for a few years.

God tells us that we need to take our enemies little by little. If we go to fast, we might succumb to the beast. Joyce Meyer suggests that the beast is our pride. I think that is what happened a few years ago. I was taking my mind back to fast and pride got in the way. I wasn’t ready.

So now I’m back further than when I started. You know, two steps forward, three steps back. I have to start over again. And forget everything I said above. Start fresh. But start in my mind. Once I get that back under control, the rest should follow.

First step? Peeking over the edge of the trench? Maybe just standing up? Maybe opening my eyes? Maybe unclenching? I’ve been waiting for the bomb to hit far too long.

And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.
1 Peter 5:10 (ESV)

Chapter 3 – Don’t Give Up

A Christian without victory. That’s what I am. I knew this. I’ve known it for a long time. I just didn’t have the proper terminology. Well, it’s not pretty, but there it is.

The Israelites were on a journey, an 11-day journey from their captivity to the Promised Land, and it took them 40 years to get there. I am a true Israelite. I was put on a journey, a momentous journey from sin to new life. One moment I was a tiny newborn babe and the next, I was washed by the waters of Holy Baptism and I was a child of the Most High. I’ll be 40 this year. Is that the magical number for when I finally accept that Jesus is enough and give the rest of it up? Or am I worse than even the Israelites. Will it take me longer?

And why fight so hard to keep a diseased mind? Why not give it over to God to “reprogram”? Because my old ways are so familiar. A well-beaten path. GIGO. Garbage In Garbage Out.

How many books will I have to read before I can finally transform. That’s what I was looking for. Well, I already have the answer … Just One. The Bible.

And I’m scared of what I’ll become on the other side. Will I be me anymore? I’ll be the real me I’m told. What would that look like?

How many of us are there? Christians without victory? I believe the number is simply enormous. Which makes it so hard to trust anyone … Are you like me? Out to make your own little kingdom? A kingdom of safety.

And a prison.

I argue with God a lot now. Why me? Where? What? How? And I just want to give up everything. I don’t want to care.

But the title says Don’t Give Up. And I’ll keep reading.

“The Lord our God said to us in Horeb, ‘You have stayed long enough at this mountain. See, I have set the land before you. Go in and take possession of the land that the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give to them and to their offspring after them.’”
Deuteronomy 1:6,8 (ESV)

Chapter 2 – A Vital Necessity

I am double-minded. Schizophrenically so. I can be of one mind and the next instant be of another. The example is always: You attend church on Sunday morning, but no sooner are you with your family for brunch afterwards, than the sinful nature takes over.

I say that is being kind. Who doesn’t sit in the pew during the sermon and think double-minded thoughts: she should NOT wear that to church; is he drinking coffee? Well I haven’t seen them for a long time; he wants us to take notes again? Don’t forget to stop and get gas on the way home.

When your gas tank is low, it is a “vital necessity” to stop at the gas station and buy gas else you not make it all the way home. If your library book is overdue, it is a “vital necessity” to find it and get it to the library else you will be fined. You cannot make pancakes for breakfast without eggs – it is a “vital necessity” to get some or your children will be disappointed.

Those are a little silly. You are having chest pains. You think you are having a heart attack. It is a VITAL NECESSITY that you seek medical attention else you might die.

Unfortunately, we don’t consider the health of our spiritual life to be a “vital necessity”. It gets worse and worse without our immediate and direct attention. Today’s complaint about the length of the sermon becomes next week’s decision to sleep in on Sunday morning. I didn’t go last week and I don’t think I want to go this week either.

How about your mind? You are what you think. You have positive thoughts and you live positively. You have negative thoughts and you live a negative life. A healthy mind bears healthy fruit. A diseased mind bears diseased fruit.

How can I love God whom I cannot see, when I cannot love the person right in front of me? How can I love the person right in front of me if I cannot love myself?

It is a vital necessity that I change the way I think. I need to take back my mind. It does not belong to the Devil. I belong to Christ – purchased and won. I am worth the battle.

For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.
Romans 8:5 (ESV)

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)

Dig Deeper

1.     What is one prayer you have been lifting up for a long time but have not seen the answer your heart longs for? 

To say that I have lifted up a certain prayer for a long time … I would consider that false. I will have something on my heart forever, but do I continue to pray about it? I doubt it. I don’t pray well. Even after all of this. I am a horrible prayer person.

I wrote a drama. I considered it dialogue. Then someone called it a prayer sequence and I was flabbergasted. Was it? Let’s see, someone talks to God and God answers. Oh my goodness! I guess it was! So if I have these mini dialogues within my head … could they be prayer as well?

Yes, I’m feeling a call to do something … more? Different? I’m uncertain. And after the last several years, I’m more confused than ever. Borderline feeling crazy. And I’m not getting a direct answer. And I’m not getting direction from anywhere. The end result has been I’m less focused than ever. I feel like this won’t change.

But if I were to try consistent prayer over time out … would I see a difference? Is that what’s missing from the equation?

What have you learned through this process of consistent prayer over time?

I have learned that I need to work more on consistent prayer over time.

When do I tend to quit or give up instead of endure?

When I don’t get any support or help. When no one is with me. When I get negatives responses each way I turn. When it seems like nothing I do helps or brings forth change. When my needs or wants are not considered. When I’m told what to do, but not involved. I cease to care and slowly stop doing what I was doing.

What needs to change in my actions or attitudes so I can be sure I will endure in a way that honors God the next time I hit this wall?

I have to stop worrying about ME. It’s not about ME. The world does not revolve around ME. What I do, I should do for God and God alone and things would be right if nothing else. If I do everything with God in mind, there may be suffering, but it will be for His purposes and He rewards His s servants after this lifetime. I need to worry about what God thinks and forget what others think.

Who can encourage me and help me in my training in this area of my life?

I have discovered that I need a mentor. I don’t know where to find one. One has been suggested to me … But I’m not feeling it. I’m seriously thinking I need a match.com but for pairing Christian mentors with students … Because it would help enormously if that person were a little like me …

Describe a time when you faced deep loneliness (remember, you can be lonely even when people are around you). 

Last few years? I feel like I have been abandoned. Left behind. Everyone is busy with their jobs. And I’m not. Everyone has something “important” to do, but I don’t. This is wrong thinking. I know this. But everyone is too busy. So I fill my time up with little things. I’d rather be doing big things.

I don’t want to go to a class and sit and listen for an hour. I don’t want to go to church and sit and listen for 2 hours. I want to have relationships with people. Other people seem to have appointments with people. Have to be scheduled in. I’m through making appointments to be with people.

How did God use this experience to draw near to you and to draw you closer to him?

I keep telling myself that God is showing me that I cannot rely on people, but I can rely on Him. He wants to show me that He is the one and only and He is the only one I need to focus on. When everyone and everything else is gone, He will still be there. But either I haven’t learned the lesson yet, or I titled the lesson wrong.

Jenny Garth said, after divorcing Jim Carey, she made a list of all the things he did wrong and then substituted her name for his. So if she said “Jim never pays attention to me” she changed it to “Jenny never pays attention to Jim”. Who knew? That I could get good advice from Jenny Garth? Maybe others didn’t withdraw from me. I withdrew from them?

Yesterday, Don Miller blogged about going deeper rather than wider. Instead of fishing for more friends, build better relationships with the ones you have. Instead of going for 1,000 FB friends. Spend actual time with your dearest friends.

I keep complaining about where our society is going … we don’t have time for real relationships anymore. Our conversations have become Tweets. 140 characters or less that just gets sent out into cyberspace. Some get answered, most are ignored. I should start practicing what I preach … Concern myself with people. I have a feeling I won’t be lonely anymore.

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. These things I command, so that you will love one another.
John 15: 12-17 (ESV)

One More Day!

Genesis 22:1-14

1.     Imagine you were Abraham and had to walk through this life experience. What are some of the feelings you would face?

I often think questions like this are quite unfair. Let’s just pretend that I’m asked to kill my first born. After that first devilish desire to agree to it, the answer is, “absolutely not! No, never, I will not. I cannot!

And this when I have two and am young and could get more.

So you say, pretend you’re Abraham and your more than 100 years old and this is your only son, the promised son to build a nation from. And there isn’t all of that lovely technology to take a chance with and have octoplets … NO!

But I’m still not quite in the role.

Remember it is GOD, the voice, talking to you. (Imagine Roy Luecke.)

I think I’d give just about anything for God to speak loud and clear in my ear and give me a direct order. How could I not?

I sit here imagining scenarios I might be given in which the answer would still be a resounding NO. Lovely.

Feelings? Anger, frustration, confusion, fear, uncertainty, panic, sorrow.

2.    Years later, as Abraham looked back on this whole experience, how might it have impacted his life and faith?

I would be very quick to answer the call of God. Send ME. Or at least quicker. I think he’d be willing to give a whole lot more of himself. And if that was the last time he heard the Voice of God, I would be quite anxious to meet up with Him again.

Yet, I have an experience I can look back on. Hindsight. And see how God had a different plan for me. It all worked out. I have it quite easy. Perhaps too easy. That experience hasn’t kept me from questioning any of His new plans.

Now think about this experience from Isaac's perspective (remember, he was the one that was placed on the altar as a young boy). How might this whole experience have impacted Isaac's life and faith?
Aside from thinking my Father was a lunatic? Although Abraham didn’t share very much of the request/scenario with his son at the time, I must imagine that it was a story they shared growing up. It might have prepared him a bit for what God had in store for him.

However, if you know of a person that God has talked to, think of how skeptical we are. Children today might pass on the wonder of the story having heard it so so so very many times. When Isaac passed on the story, there was probably the unedited version and then the version he told his friends. “Hey, Isaac! What really happened?” “Well, let me tell you …”

3.    John points out that the word "testing" (a difficult experience through which a person's true values, commitments, and beliefs are revealed) is only used in reference to the people of God. Why would God reserve testing for his children?

Number one: we are the only ones properly prepared for it. We know the greater picture and the grander purpose. We have faith to fall back upon and build upon. And we should have our eyes on the right goal.

 Number two: God does not want us to remain childlike and immature. He wants us to advance in our faith, love, gifts, abilities and habits. How do we advance children grade to grade? We test them to determine if they are ready. We look for areas that need work and train them appropriately.

Number three: We are God’s clay. We are God’s silver. He molds us and fires us to make us pure and beautiful

How can testing be a form of true love?

He wants us so desperately. He yearns for us. He calls to us. He makes Himself open and available. He will not deny us that which we need most. In return He wants us to trust Him implicitly. He wants our dependence upon Him. He wants us willing. He prepares us for Himself.

I don’t know about testing being a form of true love. But anyone willing to go to so much trouble for us in order to bring us home. That’s true love.

In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith –
more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire –
may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
1 Peter 1:6-7 (ESV)

It's the Final Countdown!

1.     John writes about the stages a person faces when running a marathon:

a.     Pleasure

b.    Drudgery

c.     Effortful labor

d.    Temptation to quit – "hitting the wall"

e.     Either endurance or quitting

If you look at your spiritual life as a race, describe what phase you are in and how it feels right now.

Temptation to quit – “hitting the wall”. There are moments of pleasure, but they are few and far in between. Mostly it is drudgery. On occasion I experience effortful labor. But before the words were put into my mouth by a book, I considered that I had hit a wall. Hit it hard. Knocked me to my knees in sobbing pain.

It always amazes me in Bible Studies -there are much older people who talk about having doubts in their faith. Not that they aren’t allowed. But it is the terminology that throws me. My faith is in Jesus. That does not change. He is the One and Only. It is through Him that I am saved. There is nothing that I can do to win Salvation for myself.

It is my spiritual life that falters. Not my faith. Faith is all I have. The wall that I have hit in my spiritual life is not about quitting Jesus or my faith in Him. I still have it. But it is the way that it moves me and works through me that is struggling – that has hit the wall. I don’t like it. 

I cannot possibly keep up this pace. I want to quit. There are things I want to quit. I suppose I have already quit two things, but hadn’t considered it as such. I need to quit more. But I’m not really a quitter. I’d rather work myself to death.

2.    Tell about a time when you "hit the wall" in some area of your life and kept pressing on.

I think I have hit a wall in my career. Okay, I don’t want a career. Society wants me to have a career. I really don’t care about a job that much. Especially a job that is dysfunctional. I don’t wake up every morning thinking that I am going to bring literacy to the world. UGH! Who wants that? I like to play Devil’s Advocate and say that books are no better than television. Empty diversions preventing you from doing real work.

When I say I’ve hit a wall in my career, I mean that I started off as a successful Library Director for a small Academic Library. My track record was excellent. I had to do it all and I did it well and more. But it was a sinking ship and I bailed before I had to do the same job and more in half the time.

My next job was as an Assistant Librarian for a large corporation. I just assumed that the Head would retire eventually and then it would be mine. Not that I wanted it. Who knew that they would decide they didn’t really need a library. They tried to make me into something I wasn’t and it for whatever reason, it didn’t work out.

And the only other job I could find was the one I currently have and it took me two years to get. Part-time, paraprofessional. But it was the best job I had ever had. All the fun and less of the stress. I considered myself retired because I had the cherry job for people who weren’t ready to stay at home all day.
 
And now I’ve it the wall. I’m way too young to retire. I have no control. I do what I’m told before I am told and I do it well. I’m not functioning as a professional. Oh, I use my skills earned with my Masters, but not for anything grand. Why bother? I can do it all and still be a part-time paraprofessional. Again, why bother?

What did you learn from this experience?

Sometimes you hunker down and protect your sensitive areas and wait for an opportunity to rise again. I just didn’t realize that that was what I was doing. I’ve been hunkered for so long, I’ve forgotten how to run with the flag. Or take the flag. Perhaps the battlefield is empty – long-abandoned and I’m still in the trench waiting for more … And my supplies are greatly diminished!

James 1:2-4

3.    We face times of struggle and pain. What counsel does James give us that will help us make it through these times?

He assures us that God only tests His own and we should face the struggles with joy, knowing that we are growing in our faith and will receive its goal – eternity.

Tell about a time when you were able to experience joy even though you were going through a time of trial.

I don’t know if this is considered a trial of God … it was a trial nonetheless. My family was on the verge of losing everything and much was lost, but it pulled us together.

Not long before, I had been living self-sufficiently, not asking or taking help from anyone. It did not bother me. I was proud that I could survive on my own. I had control.

Then I could no longer live self-sufficiently. I required help and support. I was no longer in control. We couldn’t have survived without our family, friends and church family.

I have often said that 2007 should have been the worst year in my life, but it was more like the best. I was no longer alone. And I got back some of what I thought I had lost. It was joyful. And I miss those times. I felt like a part of something even when exclusion could or should have been the norm.

Sing praises to the Lord, O you his saints,
and give thanks to his holy name.
For his anger is but for a moment,
and his favor is for a lifetime.
Weeping may tarry for the night,
but joy comes with the morning.
Psalm 30:4-5 (ESV)