Daily Reading
Living the Enemy's Script
Satan uses the Arrows that strike all of us this side of the Fall and weaves them into a story line to convince us that we cannot live without the disguise of our false self, the role we are playing out in what John and I have been calling our “smaller story.” Our smaller stories are constructed along the plotlines of control and gratification. Once we begin to live by this false self, Satan and his minions sabotage the story to make sure we are exposed. Then he mocks us for our foolishness and hypocrisy for hiding behind such a facade in the first place. Other times, he simply leaves us to die in costume.
It has only been within the last five years that I have known that his script for me existed, and only in the last two that it has become increasingly clear how the enemy uses it tactically on a day-to-day basis. The seeds of the strategy are also visible in the other members of my family, seeds planted long ago to swell and bear bitter fruit in the right time. Each of our ancestral families also has a story that the enemy is busily reinterpreting according to that family’s particular Arrows. (In this day and age, we have come to understand these things through the storyline of psychology and genetics; e.g., the Joneses have always suffered with a certain personality disorder.) One theme in my own family line, for instance, is that of emotionally unprotected or neglected individuals marrying for safety rather than emotional intimacy.
It is not an issue of whether we are being assaulted by our particular Message of the Arrows, it is a matter of whether we recognize how our particular script reads. All of us are partly living out the storyline the enemy offers us. This idea may seem too dramatic. Most of us, perhaps, live in not a terribly evil place in the moralistic sense of the word. We simply live where busyness, or apathy, or struggle with circumstances that won’t change occupies most of our energy. And the enemy is perfectly happy to leave us in such a place practicing our religion. We are already defeated. The lion, if he roars at us at all, only does so internally about certain things we need to get under control or keep hidden with regard to the smaller stories we are counting on for life.
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It has only been within the last five years that I have known that his script for me existed, and only in the last two that it has become increasingly clear how the enemy uses it tactically on a day-to-day basis. The seeds of the strategy are also visible in the other members of my family, seeds planted long ago to swell and bear bitter fruit in the right time. Each of our ancestral families also has a story that the enemy is busily reinterpreting according to that family’s particular Arrows. (In this day and age, we have come to understand these things through the storyline of psychology and genetics; e.g., the Joneses have always suffered with a certain personality disorder.) One theme in my own family line, for instance, is that of emotionally unprotected or neglected individuals marrying for safety rather than emotional intimacy.
It is not an issue of whether we are being assaulted by our particular Message of the Arrows, it is a matter of whether we recognize how our particular script reads. All of us are partly living out the storyline the enemy offers us. This idea may seem too dramatic. Most of us, perhaps, live in not a terribly evil place in the moralistic sense of the word. We simply live where busyness, or apathy, or struggle with circumstances that won’t change occupies most of our energy. And the enemy is perfectly happy to leave us in such a place practicing our religion. We are already defeated. The lion, if he roars at us at all, only does so internally about certain things we need to get under control or keep hidden with regard to the smaller stories we are counting on for life.
Want More? Order your copy of The Sacred Romance today