Friday, November 03, 2006

Spiritual Battles

What does “spiritual battles” mean to you?? For me, it was a term to express some struggles we face especially when we are serving God. But lately, through some events, this term actually becomes soo vivid that at a time I was scared;; scared to realize the realness and closeness of the battles around us. Whether you like it or not, admit it or not, you see it or not, it exists.

The reason why it suddenly hits me hard is due to deaths. Starting last year, I’ve been to quite a number of funerals and learned about people I know passed away. This week, I learned another young beautiful talented young lady, I don’t know her too well - she’s a friend’s friend, but we met and had some dialogues before, passed away .. just at age of 27. It is hard to deal with the feeling of loss especially for these prematured deaths. It is even harder to learn she’s actually starting to open up to Christ, or willing to listen and learn more about God.

So this scare feeling hits me when I learned about it … After some thoughts and reflection, I finally aware it’s the realization that the spiritual battles are sooo real and close that frightened me. Think we, at least I for sure, might have 1) underestimated the power of satan and what they can achieve (right, they still are under God’s “supervision” …) 2) overestimated our power on how much we can achieve (or fix); and 3) “over-dependent” (in lack of a better term) on God’s grace.

I think one of the reasons for the above is due to our lack of the alert of being in a battle .. we don’t see that we are in a battle due to the comfort we have here in North America in general. We see ourselves as outsider instead being part of the battle. It is sad to reveal we are actually in a battle yet we do not aware or are not alert about that. But without being alert, we are basically slowly giving rooms/grounds to satan without even realizing it .. (I’m not talking about the “win” of satan re: death .. I’m actually thinking about how we Christians react to these incidences .. something we don’t expect, we don’t want happening - how do we deal with our emotions etc. I believe we might lose grounds there for satan if we don’t deal with them properly.) this is sad. Like Psalm 1: 1-2 .. in order to act out all these .. we need to be alert and aware what situation we are in. Without realizing where we are .. we can basically do nothing, or we do not know what is the right thing to do!

Yet, I am thankful .. thankful for fellowships that God gifted to us .. so that we have support and companion in this battle .. we can talk through things, we can remind each other. Having a strong real fellowship (not just physically attending one) is like a castle – minimize the chance of being defeated. United and fellowship is a common theme popping up lately in my life .. and I’m really really thankful for all of you who “keep” me in fellowship!!

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