My house is like a huge underground zoo – you know, the kind you saw on antz or a bug’s life. I share it with all sorts of living creatures, led by colonies of ants and their attendant uncles. In the last day alone, I’ve dispatched to their maker a flame-red cockroach, a rather obese safari ant, a cricket, grasshopper and some other flying creature I can’t find in the encyclopedia of crawling things. I suspect it’s punishment for my rather violent dislike for all things crawling.
But of all these visitors, the ones who are fronting a real challenge for residence are the ants. They come in their thousands and pop up out of every imaginable crevice. And, they don’t die. On the contrary, the more you sweep them away, the more they bring forth. I wonder what their newspapers look like – they must have about a million pages worth of obituaries every day. It is absolutely frustrating, yet I can’t help but admire their tenacity. Sometimes, I’m even tempted to let them be, and find a way for us to live together.
Like with the ants, the devil and I have come a long way. From the days when I didn’t even know he existed, to the days when I changed sides and the duels began. Thereafter, it’s been a see-saw. I sweep him out, he comes back in. Sometimes he disappears for a while, only to come back better suited, and with a battalion. Other times, when things get really bad and the insecticide isn’t working, I’m tempted to let him be. Then I remember that statement that I have been taught and come to learn, that what you allow you eventually accept.
So instead, I’ve become a student of the art of war. I have refused to be ignorant of his wily devices. Ants, by the way, use numbers to intimidate. The devil, he has quite an impressive arsenal. I’m unraveling it item by item. Someday, I’ll be pretty good at knowing how to knock out everything he can dish out. Recently though, I’ve been learning about the one he used to fell the Israelites and prevent them from getting into Canaan. It’s called discouragement.
My pastor recently commented that if the deceiver could only have one weapon, it would be discouragement. With most of us, he doesn’t have to do much to get us into a place of hopelessness at the tasks that lay before us – all he has to do is blow up a few things, exaggerate our vision of horror and we’re done for.
Those Israelite men, they decided that they were grasshoppers, and the giants who lived in the big city with walls up to the sky (sounds ridiculous, right?) would maul them. And that was it – we are told only Joshua and Caleb made it. I understand, because I’m the kind of guy who can talk himself into a bout of depressive fits at the smallest of molehills.
I’m also the guy who’s understood the lesson that discouragement is not just an emotion to get over, it’s the devil fighting to stop me from moving. So I’m buffeting my anti-discouragement shield, made of the words of God to me – fear not; be strong and of good courage. I’m taking my pastor’s advice and turning my tribulations into triumphs, failures into fortunes, setbacks into successes, obstacles into opportunities and my burdens into blessings.
As for the ants and bugs, I continue to sweep them out without fear or favor. A day cometh when they will be no more and I will have won!
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