The Devil and Despair

I was, in retrospect, too naïve.

I had embarked on my new leadership role in a hopeful posture.  With Proverbs as my guide, I determined to myself that the best way to lead—since I didn’t really know how to lead—would be to let God show me how.

I set careful guides for myself.  I would be open and accessible to everyone, even those who disagreed with me.  I would approach everyone in good faith, with a spirit of generosity, peace, and kindness.  I would forgive and show compassion.  I would be careful to build up people with words, rather than to tear them down, and exercise discretion in my speech.

I had bad days, of course.  I tripped over politics and made well-meaning mistakes and, frankly, fell into the periodic trap of being less discreet and less patient than I should have been.  But even so, I was growing closer with God, and the approach I had taken was reaping real benefits.  People noticed a real difference, and when they asked I was able to tell them that I was trying to let my faith inform my approach.

I felt buoyed, like I was living a triumphant Psalm.  God granted me favor with those from whom I required it; He blessed my efforts; He was the place I returned to when my frustration or disillusionment grew.  I settled into my role, started to feel like I had been called there.

And then over the course of two weeks, chaos.

Without giving details, I’ll simply say this.  Every now and then, a situation occurs that makes you wonder why you bothered being kind or decent at all, and the last two weeks were full of those situations. People I approached with kindness responded with venom; people I had made an effort to forgive for deep wounds hurt me again; critical projects fell apart for the reasons aforementioned and people jumped ship for no reason other than caprice. 

I sat in my mentor’s office, holding back tears. 

He was sympathetic.  “Sometimes no good deed goes unpunished,” he told me gently. He has lived through it too.  And he readily admits that living through this sort of thing has changed him into someone more cynical and wary than he might otherwise be.  “This is just how it goes.”

He’s not a person of faith.  He knows I am.  He tells me frequently that if I feel myself beginning to become cynical, or falling into despair, I should walk away.  He warns me that my values, faith-informed though they may be, come first, and I am grateful to him for that.

 This is just how it goes.

At the end of that last week I sat having coffee with a friend and colleague who has endured some of this litany of misery with me.  We nursed our drink in silence, looking ahead at the bleak prospects for all our good efforts.  Maybe, I said, I’m not cut out for this, or maybe I shouldn’t have tried to move forward in this way.

My friend’s brow furrowed. “It seems to me,” she said, “that where you’ve tried to forgive in Christ, you’ve gotten bitten. And where you’ve extended kindness in Christ, you’ve gotten bitten.  And where you’ve tried to move forward with hope and in peace in Christ, you’ve gotten bitten.  That about right?”

That did, indeed, sum it up.

She smiled. “And all of this went wrong in one week?    And all of these things are making you feel despair and rethink how you approach? “She peered at me over her coffee cup. “That kind of despair doesn’t come from God.  I think you’re under spiritual attack. And if you are, I mean there’s only one thing to do in response, right?  You keep going.  Girl, listen—don’t you dare stop.”

I found myself so startled by the conversation. 

I believe in spiritual warfare.   I believe in evil and I believe in Satan.  But I’ve also struggled over time seeing those concepts misused.  I’ve dealt with my share of Christians who believed they were such significant threats to the kingdom of Satan that Satan himself had come to take them out: a deeply self-aggrandizing, prideful attitude that always left me cold.  And I have dealt with Christians who held Satan responsible for everything, including hangnails and their own bad choices.

So I have been loathe to invoke the language of spiritual warfare and spiritual attack in my own life.  And yet, talking to my friend, that’s suddenly all I could see.  Because I did feel despair.  And I was considering giving up.  And I was tired and overwhelmed and sick of being in people’s sights, as sick as Elijah at the base of Mt. Horeb. 

It is easy to forget, in our pursuit of God, what is not from God.

The divided mind, fear, anxiety, despair, cynicism, resentment, loathing, apathy, indifference: perhaps in terms of spiritual warfare these are flags to watch for with greatest caution.  The sense that there’s no point in bothering, that we aren’t meant to be here, that we aren’t making a difference can in fact bog us down into a quagmire of uselessness.

I know all this, of course.  But I find it startling how easy it is to succumb, or how simple it is to get away from the realization that the means matter more than the end.  Fundamentally, if I am pressing forward in the way Christ desires in any area, then the outcome is largely irrelevant.  To remain close to God, to bring him where I can, is the goal. 

And I needed a friend to remind me of it. Hopefully, for those of you who need to hear it, this is a reminder that will bless you, too.