Looking outside of yourself for love and acceptance, leaves your happiness in the hands of others.
Kirren was cloaked in exhaustion as if she’d splurged for it and now needed to get her money’s worth.
When your mind is free of the incessant chatter from our inner critics, we are better able to attend to being our most authentic selves and to enjoy life and all it has to offer.
103When we try to be something that we are not, we become the slave of a rigid, fixed mind, following a rule about how things have to be. The violence and the anger in us remain unnoticed, because we are caught in our pictures of how we should be.
In contemporary American culture our slavery to the fear of death produces superficial consumerism, a fetish for managing appearances, inauthentic relationships, triumphalistic religion, and the eclipse of personal and societal empathy. These are the “works of the devil” in our lives, works produced by our slavery to the fear of death.
To follow Jesus, therefore, is to undergo a training that refuses to let death, even death at the hands of enemies, determine the shape of our living.88.
This is how worship is connected to our ability to love. When we give our ultimate allegiance to any of the principalities and powers, large or small, we find ourselves perennially at war with anyone who places these things at risk. Idolatry breeds perpetual vigilance and violence.
Satan might not be a personalized agent, but I do believe there are moral forces that transcend individuals, forces that have a real causal effect on moral decision-making.
Basically, a satan is more of a relationship than a person. Anything that is facing you in an antagonistic or adversarial way – working against you as an opponent or enemy – is standing before you as ha satan, as an adversary, as a satan. In the Bible, Satan and the Devil are interchangeable names for the personification of all that is adversarial to the kingdom and people of God, the personified Enemy of God.
Salvation, then, involves liberation from this fear. Salvation is emancipation for those who have been enslaved all of their lives by the fear of death. Salvation is a deliverance that sets us free from this power of the devil.
In sum, when Paul writes in Ephesians 6 that our battle is against the principalities and powers, he’s not just talking about demon possession, he’s also talking about our struggle with political powers.
The kingdom of God is the hard, intimate, and sweaty work of simply getting along with people.
The trouble with the Devil is that we see him in the faces of those we hate, justifying our violence toward them.
It’s the same problem we struggle with when it comes to marginalizing our privilege, power, or position as we focus on the voices and concerns of those who have been marginalized and oppressed. Even our social justice efforts become contaminated by our desire to be the center of attention as we fail to place weaker and less powerful voices at the center of our concerns.
You forget that every fallen angel was once an angel themselves. Monsters don’t really want to be monsters. We’re just like everyone else, waiting for someone to come save us from our very own damned darkness.
Nothing is wrong. It’s merely what you think is right and wrong that has you confused.
I want to be proud that she has a backbone, but I also want to break it, snapping it into itty-bitty pieces.
I’m like the monster that hides under your bed, waiting till the moment your breath evens out, and your eyes close to attack.
I glare at him, willing ice daggers to come out of my eyes and stab him.
Your body doesn’t carry you up there. Your mind does. Your body is exhausted hours before you reach the top; it is only through will and focus and drive that you continue to move. If you lose that focus, your body is a dead, worthless thing beneath you.