Fighting for Your Life

 1 John 5:4    For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—OUR FAITH.  

Have you ever found yourself “fighting for your life” with everything that is within you?  To your amazement, your strength increases as the stress piles on and you endure until…. your breaking point.  For everyone, that point is different.  As we cope through the breaking points of life, sometimes we put up a shield of protection so that we can continue the fight and behind it we hide our true feelings of sadness, grief, hurt, and pain.    Many individuals use, humor, anger, aloofness, busyness, materialism, and new relationships as their shield during a “fight for their life”.

To use a shield to protect our emotions for a short period of time, can sometimes be beneficial, to get to the other side of a short fight when we have the advantage.  But… what about the times, when we know in our hearts, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that life as we know it has changed?   In these cases, stuffing emotions and prolonging their inevitable emergence, leave us at risk for depression, extramarital affairs, mental illness, and stress related, chronic, physical conditions.

A shield of anything other than the shield of faith, is a shield that will not protect us long-term.  Unlike the other shields mentioned above, the shield of faith allows us to courageously face the changes of life, feel the emotions that come with the change, heal us on the inside, and finally this shield gives comfort through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Ephesians 6:16 In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish ALL the flaming darts of the evil one;