looking out at a sunrise from a ransomed heart bootcamp towards north arapaho peak near fraser, co.
yesterday was a really hard day. a culmination of a couple of decades of pushing through some hard stuff. not going into the details but want to put it in the context of living out John 10:10…that tension between the evil one who comes to kill, crush and destroy and the truth that Jesus desires only an amazing life for us.
as we pushed through the day…the daily reading from john eldredge that appeared in my inbox helped to nail it…to remind me (and offer others encouragement) that the larger context is everything.
The core of Satan’s plan for each of us is not found in tempting us with obvious sins like shoplifting or illicit sex. These things he uses more as maintenance strategies. His grand tactic in separating us from our heart is to sneak in as the Storyteller through our fears and the wounds we have received from life’s Arrows. He weaves a story that becomes our particular “Message of the Arrows.” Counting on our vanity and blindness, he seduces us to try to control life by living in the smaller stories we all construct to one degree or another. He accuses God to us and us to God. He accuses us through the words of parents and friends and God himself. He calls good evil and evil good and always helps us question whether God has anything good in mind in his plans for us. He steals our innocence as children and replaces it with a blind naivete or cynicism as adults.
At the same time Satan is at work reinterpreting our own individual stories in order to make God our enemy, he is also at work dismantling the Sacred Romance-the Larger Story God is telling-so that there is nothing visible to take our breath away. He replaces the love affair with a religious system of dos and don’ts that parches our hearts and replaces our worship and communion services with entertainment. Our experience of life deteriorates from the passion of a grand love affair, in the midst of a life-and-death battle, to an endless series of chores and errands, a busyness that separates us from God, each other, and even from our own thirstiness.
Part of Satan’s grand strategy of separating us from our heart, once Jesus has drawn us to an awareness of being his sons and daughters through believing faith, is to convince us that our heart’s desires are at core illegitimate.
(The Sacred Romance , 107-9)
if you don’t know about john eldredge and the ministry of ransomed heart please check them out. amazing wisdom in his pen (or keyboard).