Daily Grace
One passage. One idea. A few quiet minutes. Short devotional readings for people being formed by grace, written from a small chair beside still water in Falcon, Colorado.
Pull one up. Read slowly. There is no hurry here.
The Wrong Target
And yet almost everything in my life is organized around wrestling with flesh and blood. The person on the board. The person in the comments. The person at the other end of the country who votes wrong. The family member. The neighbor.
"For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood." (Ephesians 6:12)
Read that again, because we do not believe it. We do not wrestle against flesh and blood. And yet almost everything in a life gets organized around wrestling with flesh and blood. The person on the board. The person in the comments. The one at the far end of the country who votes wrong. The family member. The neighbor. The one who said the thing. That is where the energy goes, and where the imagination goes when we lie down at night, running the argument again, winning it again, and feeling worse.
Paul says that is not the fight. Not because those people are not difficult; they are. Not because what they did was fine; it was not. But because they are not the enemy, and as long as you are swinging at them, you are swinging at the wrong thing, and you are doing exactly what the actual enemy would most like you to do with an afternoon.
The person across from you is a person who is also being fought. Both of you are. That does not excuse either of you, and it does not make the harm imaginary. It means you have been aiming at the wrong target for most of your adult life, and every ounce of strength spent hating a human being is an ounce the real enemy was glad to see you waste. Lift your eyes past the face in front of you. There is a battle on, and it was never with them.