Compartmentalizing
On Sunday, Dale finished a 2 part sermon series called Unmasking Satan. During the message he shared a list of lies that Satan uses against us. One the lies hit me personally as I realized Ang and I have been repeating it to each other a great deal lately.
Life won’t always be this hard.
As soon as that statement was made, the truth behind the lie came to me. When we tell ourselves that life won’t always be this hard it allows us not to deal with the reality of what is happening right now. We can push it off and disconnect emotionally and spiritually from it. We can tell ourselves that we don’t need God because soon this too will pass and life will continue on.
This reminds me of Job and how he dealt with life when he lost everything. Job didn’t spend his time sitting in the ashes, saying to himself, “Life won’t always be this hard.” No, he dealt with it; he faced it head on and took it to God. He allowed himself to feel the emotions and he worked through it. He did not live in denial and hope that maybe life would get better.
Ever since I was a young, I have taught myself how to disconnect and compartmentalize life. It has been my coping mechanism for hard times. While some of this can be good, the danger lies in doing this for every bad thing that happens and never really dealing with any of it. Compartmentalizing is like packing away all your junk into boxes and putting in the attic. At some point you’re going to have to deal with it (like when you move) and it’s always a bigger job to deal with the junk down the road than it is right now. We can’t be afraid to face our hardships head on. We can’t buy into the lie that life will not always be this hard because it may get even harder. God doesn’t promise us an easy life, but He does promise to walk through each hardship with us. So the next time you find yourself saying, “Life won’t always be this hard,” remind yourself that Satan is just trying to distract you from dealing with the hardship and moving on from it.
Morgan,
The statement that, ‘Life won’t always be this hard’ is both true and false. It’s true in the light of Jesus Christ that no matter what comes our way we can endure all things as long as we keep our eyes and hearts on him. And, believe it or not, it’s false for the same reason. Life can be hard, very hard and sometimes even seem down right cruel, but, “in the light of Jesus Christ that no matter what comes our way we can endure all things as liong as we keep our eyes and hearts on him.”
So no matter if we experience the good things in our lives or the bad, it is endurable as long as we have Jesus in our lives. One of my favorite sayings is, ‘Never challenge worse, because things can ALWAYS be worse.’ I know as well as you that I can be very simplistic in my theology. But I truly try to see the light shining in whatever cloud may come my way…
Gerry