Where The Battle Takes Place

The battleground is never what you think it will be.

Spiritual warfare is always described in martial terms in Scripture: armor and swords and shields. We rely on this metaphor; we internalize it.  When we think of the battleground I imagine we often think of Russell Crowe in the movie Gladiator, of dust and dirt and grit and blood, of armies, of valiant charges into enemy territory.  We think of The Enemy, who looms over the battlefield.

But this is not really where the battle takes place.

The battle takes place in our offices, in paperwork-strewn cubicles and in front of computer monitors, in grocery store parking lots where toddlers melt down into screams and wails, over the phone with stubborn, bewildered parents, in church pews when the gossip filters in, in bed at night when the thoughts turn darker and less holy.

There’s not much of triumph or glamour or glory in these places—just mundane, quotidian frustrations. The day-to-day buildup of challenges that irritate and annoy.  The little resentments that build into festering loathing.

I offended someone with my hopefulness today.

A work project requires me to engage with some a much-loathed group of people.  The dislike is in many cases justifiable: these people don’t play fair and I frankly don’t like them much either.  But we need them, to do what needs to be done.  And they need us, to do what needs to be done.  And so here we are, working together—or trying—and hammering out compromises and workable solutions.

“You know it’s not going to matter,” a colleague muttered to me today.  “Trying all this listening and working with them and making the effort—it’s not going to change anything and it’s not going to make a difference.”

I explained what is true for me, and what often motivates me: the recognition that nothing will change if I sit back and refuse to act, and that something could change if I keep a hopeful attitude and attempt to engage.

“Don’t bother,” my colleague said with a shrug.  “Just give up.”

I thought about that conversation a long time after I came home.  It rankled me.  Something about it gnawed at me all through dinner and dessert and after.  I was bothered by his response.  I was bothered by how much it ate at me.  Am I doing the wrong thing by trying? I wondered.  By listening to people I don’t like, by hoping that maybe this time something will change?

And this is a battleground, too.

Discouragement is so easy.  Bitterness, resentment, and despair.  It’s all so simple.  It requires so little.  Thinking that things will never change, that what we do won’t matter, that there’s no path forward, that it will always be like this: it’s so simple.  Shrug and kick back.  Laugh at the poor fools who try.

The trying is the battle.  To choose effort over disengagement, hopefulness over despair, forgiveness over dismissal. To keep your heart open when it should by all rights be closed.  To wait patiently.  To take the loss and keep going even when a win looks impossible and may be impossible.

This is the kind of battle no one really wants to fight.

For all our love of military imagery, the battles God calls us to often require us to “lose” in an earthly sense.  Forgive the one who hurts you and you may win the spiritual war and still look like an earthly idiot.  Keep your heart open and engage in good faith, trusting God’s providence, and you may store up victories in heaven while getting mowed down in any other reckoning.  Christ the King, praise Him, saved us on a cross. 

It’s never easy.

We are all Peters.  All out here with our swords because we think we know what battleground we’re on, lopping off ears on social media and in conversations because we think this is what God called us to do.  The real battle calls us to both more and less.  Less earthly victory, less tangible gain, less “winning” in any sense we’d brag about on LinkedIn.  More hope, more encouragement, more patience, more love.  More giving.  More open hearts.

I don’t know what your battle is today, but I know gaining ground will be hard and perhaps counterintuitive.  It will require everything you have.  It is just as fraught as anything we might imagine with sword and shield and armor, but somehow occurs in the most mundane of moments when our spirits are weakest and most vulnerable to overwhelm.

I wish you strength in hope.

And courage in patient endurance.

And victory on God’s terms.  Not the world’s.