Colleen Orchanian

One of the devil's spiritual attacks is isolation. He wants us to be alone. The logical response to that attack is to be in community. Easy, right? Well, maybe not so much. Once we're in isolation, it's hard to get out. Building community is a preventive action. When you are in the right group, they can draw you out and fight the battle as your sisters and brothers in arms.

Do you want to be healed? Jesus asks this of a man who had been sick for a long time. It is a question he asks us today. Do you want to be healed?

I do. I think I'm pretty healthy, but sometimes I get angry, frustrated, and discouraged by my failures. These reactions indicate that there is still healing to be done. I have to wonder why certain spiritual attacks work on me.

Why is Satan so successful in the spiritual battle? Because we are human beings who want to be satisfied, even when we want what is not good for us. We have heart disease and add salt to our food. We have diabetes and eat ice cream every day. We are overweight but don’t feel like exercising. We know what we should be doing but just don’t do it. If there isn’t immediate gratification, we aren’t inclined to take action.

The enemy uses this human inclination for comfort and satisfaction to attack us. And so, in response—and in anticipation—we must learn to control our passions, to practice self-denial.

My Bad! That's what you say when you have messed up. You knock over someone's drink. "My bad!" You blame someone for a mistake and find that it was your own fault. "My bad!" It's a common way of acknowledging our faults, of taking the blame for something we did, of owning our mistakes. And it is said without any judgment about our identity. No self-condemnation. Just a simple statement that we were wrong.

Repentance is a little like that, in that we acknowledge our fault or sin, but there's more. We don't just say, "My bad" (although we say that). We also say, "I don't want to do that again. I want to be different."

In the movie Don't Look Up, a dark comedy made a few years ago, Earth is about to be destroyed. Everyone knows it's going to happen, and they can't do anything about it. Of course, there is panic and chaos and egotistical characters. I didn't care much for the movie, but I found one scene I loved. As a family sits at the table to wait for the end, someone says, "Maybe we should pray." But nobody knows how because God was long ago forgotten. Then one character, not a member of the family, offers to lead a prayer because he grew up in a Christian home, and he says the loveliest prayer to God. (You can look it up to get the exact words.) It is a humble prayer of surrender and petition. In their darkest moment, they turned to God.

Ephesians 1:3 tells us that God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. We have everything we need. Our spiritual arsenal is huge—or could be. A soldier can have a gun, but it's useless if he doesn't know how to use it. If it's jammed, it's useless. The same holds true for our spiritual weapons. We have to keep the weapons battle-ready, and sometimes we don't. They are available to us, but we have to learn how to use them, and we have to maintain them.

The first weapon in our spiritual arsenal is the Sword of the Spirit.

It's time to switch gears. I have been posting about common spiritual attacks we face every day. Enough about what the devil is doing. Let's consider what we can do to fight his attacks.

The world is a place of suffering, and suffering is hard. Jesus told us to pick up our cross and follow Him. I would like to follow Him, but I'd rather not have to carry that cross. Romans 5:3-5 tells us to rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint.

That is God's perspective of suffering. It's good. It can bear fruit. But it's a hard teaching.

I have many friends who are retired police officers. There is something different about them. They are low responders. When something goes wrong, they stay calm. That's not me. I sometimes feel like a chicken with its head cut off, or the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. I don't have what it takes to be in law enforcement. It's not in my nature.

As I thought about my low-responding police friends, I wondered if one's career or vocation might, by its nature, create a spiritual weakness that Satan can exploit. I reached out to people in different vocations and asked them if they faced unique spiritual challenges because of that vocation. The consensus was yes.

My dad was an all-or-nothing kind of guy. If he was interested in something, he never took it slowly. When he began running, he did marathons. When he heard about intermittent fasting, he started by fasting for three days at a time. He never tested the water first. Just jumped in completely.

I am a bit like him, especially with spiritual things.

Spiritual Warfare Continued: I have heard that the Bible says, Do not be afraid 365 times, one for each day of the year. I'm not sure how accurate that is because you can't believe everything you see on the internet, and I have not actually counted it myself. But the point is that we should not be afraid. God often repeats these words because we often need to hear them.

The Perfect Storm is a movie from 2000 that tells the true story of a fishing boat that encountered three dangerous weather fronts that unexpectedly collided to produce the worst storm in modern history. One weather front might have been manageable, or even two, but with all three, the storm was so fierce that the boat sank and all the crew members were lost.

The perfect storm in a spiritual battle is when multiple related people are each attacked at the same time, and the individual attacks are coordinated to bring maximum damage.

Many years ago, I was the Human Resources Manager in a hotel. One of my responsibilities was to assist in performance reviews, and in one of those reviews, I was unexpectedly on the receiving end of the feedback. I had interrupted the employee, and she called me on it. I did not like that, especially because she was an employee whom I didn't much care for. But she was right. And she criticized me well because she told me why interrupting was a problem. In her words, "It's like what you have to say is more important than what I have to say." Ouch!

Today's spiritual attack is about addiction, but not on the person with the addiction. Those who love the addict face as much spiritual attack as the addict does. Hence the title—Addicted to Love.

Sometimes our brains seem to freeze up, like when we eat ice cream too quickly. I was once training a friend to facilitate team building for a non-profit. We had built a list of ideas on a flip chart, and I asked her to read the list to the group as a summary. She looked at the chart for a long time and could not read a word. It's not that she was illiterate. She just froze up and could not see the words on the chart. It looked like gibberish to her. She had brain freeze.

A Confidence Game is a way to deceive or trick so you can steal something. Con games work because people are gullible and believe, in their pride, that they are smarter than the con artist. They are usually wrong.

Who is the greatest con artist? That would be Satan. And who is the gullible rube? That would be us.

The most obvious spiritual attack we get is a temptation to sin. It's been around since the Garden of Eden and it's why Jesus came to rescue and redeem us.

Sin is rebellion against God, saying NO to God. But when I sin, I don't feel like I'm rebelling. I don't feel like I am consciously saying NO to God. Why is that? Because the devil is clever. 

(Spiritual Warfare Continued)
Murphy's Law states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. That's certainly true for the work we are called to do for the Kingdom. The devil will always battle against our gifts and against anything that might bear spiritual fruit. This attack is on our apostolate.

My friend Linda recently had cataract surgery. When the doctor told her it was needed, she was skeptical. She had great vision, could easily see road signs from a distance, and could distinguish between colors with no problem. How could she have cataracts and not realize it? But she trusted the doctor and had the surgery. What a difference! She didn't know what she was missing. Her eyesight was distorted, but because it happened gradually, she didn't notice.

One of Satan's tactics is distortion, not with our eyes, but with our minds and hearts. It's like when someone totally misunderstands you. They have formed a false version of reality and it's hard to correct it.

I love playing games on my tablet or phone. It's a way to pass the time while waiting or watching TV. But I am easily drawn into the game for hours rather than a few minutes. Then I feel rotten because I wasted so much time, time that could have been used for something more valuable. Have you ever felt this way?