[Religion] Struggle and Strife

We all have personal struggles, strife and demons. Admittedly, I have fought with all of these lately. I have carried a demon (more specifically a weakness) with me for a long time and I struggle with it on a daily basis. I have had trouble with it ever since I confessed Jesus as my Savior about ten years ago.

This is heart breaking because when I hear someone ask “what is the one thing that is holding you back from God?”, I know the answer and I am not the only one who knows it. It would be one thing if we could keep our weaknesses, the things we struggle with, a secret. To lock them away and never to hear from them again but Satan is no fool. He knows what you will compromise on, what you will try and justify, what will lead you down the path of destruction. Sometimes alleviating some temptation from your weakness requires great sacrifice. In my case, my weakness required a career change.

I found out that if you try to bottle up your demons, they only fester and grow stronger. I thought the stronger my faith became, the weaker my demons would become but the exact inverse happens. When your faith becomes stronger so do your demons. The higher you rise, the more tempting a fall becomes but I can tell you from experience when you work really hard to get to a good place spiritually and you take the leap due to temptation, sure it feels great at the time but when you hit bottom and you look up to see where you were you feel you have disappointed yourself, those around you, your loved ones, and most importantly God.

On a related note, While God uses those around us to build us up, it is no coincidence that Satan uses the people around us to tear us down. For instance, God opened some pretty big doors (Rev 3:7-8) for me in the first half of 2009 and closed some others. In the process God called two of my most trusted spiritual advisers elsewhere in a relatively short period of time and I could not follow as much as I wanted to. This means that my environment has changed drastically from being one of spiritual safety to one of extreme absence. While these two individuals were not the full extent of my spiritual community and support structure but it gave me a lot of pause. I had come accustomed to having religious counsel at my finger tips. It was comfortable for me but not so much anymore. Now my circles are rather void of religious conversation and the presence of believers. Maybe there is something there; maybe it is why I was sent.

So let’s recap and connect the dots. We all struggle in this world, hence our need for God. We can not carry our demons alone, hence our need for God. As our faith grows, so do our demons, hence our need for (more) God so we continue to seek him. I also think how God created us was brilliant in that he knew we would need each other (other people that is) as a support structure. We teach each other, we help each other, we grow each other.

This post probably did not make much sense and I apologize for that. My brain is like a storm cloud at times and there is not always rhyme to the reason.