Friday, December 29, 2006

"Spiritual Warfare"?!?

This thing commonly referred to as "Spiritual Warfare" has been coming up quite a bit lately in some blogs I've been reading (Phil Wyman and John Smulo in particular).

Honestly, it's messing with my head. In a good way. At the moment, I somehow feel the desire to cry after reading Smulo's latest entry on the topic, which I don't understand at all. He asks the questions:

  1. What do you struggle with when it comes to contemporary understandings of spiritual warfare?
  2. What should spiritual warfare look like in everyday life?

Honestly, I have no clue at the moment. I could wax on about something or another and make it sound coherent and logical, but I don't feel that would do myself or anyone else justice. So instead, this post is simply a spilling out of what's in my head and heart...all to be taken with a grain of salt.

Perhaps I'm feeling emotional about it because if certain parts of my current understanding of spiritual warfare (and I agree that we need another term for that, John) aren't "real" then it casts a completely different light on some of the experiences I've had and I have to re-think and re-process them with a different spiritual understanding of what happened at those points in my life. Not to say that God didn't do anything, but the question would be, what did He actually do? Was some of it simply in my head?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing such an honest post. I think that it's worth rethinking, and struggling through what we think about this topic.

I'd be very interested to know more of your experiences if you'd feel comfortable talking about them here or via email.

I should mention I've had a few times when there's been a very real sense of evil around me, and one time when I had something very unusual happen that I had a clear sense was very demonic. But I think that in day to day life this looks like, well, day to day life.