The struggle is real….

     No seriously, it is.  Sometimes it’s hard just to lift your head off the pillow in the morning.  Take a shower.  Fix the kids breakfast.  Brush your teeth.  Or even do something as simple as open your eyes.  The strange thing about that little idiom is how quickly it picked up jet wings, and flew around the world.  It went from “Man today is kind of sucky” to “the STRUGGLE is REAL!”

Yet, I can’t be the only one that has noticed that no one is coming out of the struggle.  Am I?

The Struggle (because now it is a thing), is collecting more people than I can money in the game of monopoly, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down.  I’m pretty sure we have all known that one person who has always been the embodiment of “the struggle.”  In one way…or another.  They just can’t seem to get it together, and at the end of the day, you are both left trying to figure out – just how…

Would it surprise you to know that the Struggle is a weapon of spiritual warfare? Something sent to keep us so off-balance that we never walk in the greatness or even begin to visualize the promise that God has for us (Crazy I know!).  It is though, really.

How many times have you heard someone say, “No weapon formed against me shall prosper?”…Halloo?!  Struggle = weapon.  Therefore it should not prosper, but it does, time and time again.

We often forget that we are not battling fleshly things.  The statement should be changed from The Struggle is Real to The Fight is Real.  Do you see how much that now changes the entire outlook and connotation?  In the Color Purple, Mrs. Sophia, played by Oprah, says that famous line:

No one – and I mean, NO ONE – should have to struggle that long.  A lifetime is a very long time.

Check it out:

The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. (2 Corinthians 10:4)

Plus:

The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still. (Exodus 14:14)

Sometimes we still struggle because we, (a) are using the wrong weapons to fight back, and (b) forget that God WILL fight for us IF we just stay still (get out-of-the-way).

The main issue is, we like to give Him the struggle and stay in the ring.  Then we complain how bad the fight has gotten, when we continue to take body blows.  It doesn’t quite work that way (Trust me, I learned the hard way!  And it really hurt).  If we are “tagging” God in (and truthfully we never should have “tagged” Him out), we can’t stay in the ring.  It’s like wrestling.  They have to leave the ring when they tag their partner in.

I am not diminishing your struggles because they ARE real.  However, so is MY GOD!  He can and WILL meet your struggle where it is, no matter what it is.  He is just waiting for you to tap him in and get out of the ring.  There’s nothing wrong with taking a seat on the sidlines and letting Him fight the battle until you are equipped to stand a little longer.  Not fight (because the battle is not ours, it is the Lords), just stand.

So will you?

©Words With Faith2017