Battles – Fear and Avoidance

Battles come every day.  In whatever form they come, they come.  They come with relentless pressure, incessantly assailing the battlements of our lives and our culture.  Battles come in our marriages, in our families, in our jobs, in our communities and in our friendships.  Enemies violently storm our lives, startlingly surging out of places and people and situations that we never dreamt they would surge from.  Dark storm clouds gather over the horizon of politics, and enemies marshal their forces and assail our economy.  Deteriorating ethics and collapsing morals perpetually weaken walls that have long protected the integrity of our culture, permitting enemies of all sorts frightening entrance in places we once assumed as invincible.

Then there are the battles around our own thoughts.  We’re constantly pressing against the desire to feed that voraciously hungry dark side of ourselves and perpetrate a great wrong in order to feed it.  It seems that we are incessantly faced with vexing questions and draining decisions that seem to be intentionally designed to batter the bulwark of our morals every turn.  We are constantly faced with choices that stretch our ethics to the breaking point, effortlessly snapping the very back of those ethics as we succumb and then grapple with the guilt that suffocates us once we’ve caved.

Giving Battles Permission

Far too often these enemies seize perpetually higher ground right in middle of innumerable masses of people who ignore both the savagery of the battle, as well as the horrific consequences of the very battle that rages all around them.  Too often it’s not that we lose battles, or fight them ineptly, or run in panicked fashion away from them.  Rather, as impossible and improbable as it sounds, it’s often the case that we ignore their very existence despite the screaming ferocity of them.

The increasingly frightening nature of the battles rests not simply in the abject ignorance of many as to the battle itself, but those who write off the battle as the natural progression of the culture to some higher consciousness and more refined state of democracy.  It might be some cock-eyed sense that true advances are only restrained by the values that birthed them, so to battle on behalf of them is to battle against progress itself.  We may gorge ourselves on philosophies that bend truth to serve bent agendas, making our enemies a friend that we mistook as an enemy.  When this happens foe becomes friend, and the soft underbelly of all that we stand for becomes dangerously exposed.

Letting Battles Be Battles

The most egregious thing that we can do is to reinterpret a battle that we should fight as some glorious advancement that we need to get behind, instead of seeing it as something that we need to get behind us.  I would conjecture that the greatest cowardice is to cow-down in the face of the battles that are facing us and change the face of them so that the battle becomes invisible and we can therefore live without the guilt of having run away.  If we choose to succumb through surrender borne of reconstructed thinking, or should we rationalize unadulterated defection in the heat of the battles which are ours, we will live diminished lives scarred by defeat and undercut by failure.  And in the end, the victories that we were bred to win will become defeats that we will be doomed to bear.