The Enemy of my Enemy is my Friend



Divide and Conquer! How long has this tactic been employed? Since Satan divided man from God in the Garden? Everywhere I look now it's what I see, over and over. Black versus White, Gay versus Straight, Christian versus Muslim, everyone versus the Police and craziest yet; Christian versus Christian. There have always been conflicts between groups but the rate of escalation in just the last few months alone has been startling.

In some parts of the country the Covid "shelter in place" practices have been much more intense than they have been for us down here in a fairly rural area of NC. We've been able to come and go pretty freely, and masks are not as much of a thing here as they are elsewhere. I can't even really blame the isolation for what I'm seeing just in our neighborhood alone. The hostility of neighbor for neighbor is something we didn't really have before this year. Attitudes are changing. People don't seem to have even common courtesy towards their neighbors - loud gatherings outside in yards with loud music, loud voices, loud obscenities until the small hours of the morning without any regard for the people who live around them who might need to sleep for work the next morning, or have kids. Some of these people are people we know, and we've seen the changes in them.

Satan doesn't have to get someone to set off nukes in order to destroy the masses. He just needs to whisper in their ears. "Did God REALLY say not to eat that?" He just needs to plant the subtle seeds of suspicion or jealousy or resentment in brother, for brother. "They did this to you, so you can do this to them!" Jesus said that we should treat people as we would have people treat us. He did NOT say to go and treat people the way they HAVE treated us.

Until we can identify who the real enemy is, we can't defeat him.

Is it really a skin problem? Or is it a sin problem?

Imagine what could happen if people realized that Satan was the ultimate enemy?
Maybe then we could see that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reflections on a Marriage - 7 years in...

Image
Marriage and the Sabbath - two things that God instituted right at Creation.  They are both all about love relationships; with each other and with our Creator.  Curiously enough they are both things that are becoming less and less important to the world. Practically everyone lives together before getting married now. Marty and I did for a year before we even thought about marriage. But that's the past. We lived, we learned, we changed.  And we got married. I was 43 years old and it is my first marriage. He was 46 years old and this is his third time at bat. Do you know how hard it is to get married for the first time after the age of 40? After living on my own for 25 years? Not reporting to anyone or sharing my income and space and possessions? For heaven's sake, I hadn't even thought about marriage since I was in my late teens. In the interest of full disclosure I should probably mention that when he moved in with me he wasn't even legally divorced from...
Read more

Chapter 3 - Vengeance in the Bathroom

Image
The bathroom is our friend. It's there for us in our deepest time of need. It's there for us when we're at our lowest, at times in our lives when no one else would want to be near us. So why are people so mean to their bathrooms when they're moving out of a home? Why did that poor toilet ever do to them ? The first time the property management office called me and asked if I'd be willing to "once in a while" clean a vacant home for them it was at my husband's suggestion. The place he was remodeling was in desperate need of a cleaning and they didn't have anyone at that time to take care of it. So they called me. I told them I'd be happy to do it. Happy. I actually used the word happy.  I put on some old cut-off sweats and a grubby t-shirt. It was summer. In the south. It was about 90 degrees outside at midday. Have you ever been in a trailer in the summer? You cannot live in these things in the summer without good A/C. They're ovens! ...
Read more

Goals

Image
It's raining today. First rain we've gotten here in what seems like forever. The summer was beyond brutal - record breaking number of days over 90 degrees. It will be October before the week is over and it's finally just down into the 80's, with some 70 degree days in the ten day forecast. The local folks tell me this has not been a normal summer. The winter weather is the real payoff for me here. No blizzards, no negative number temps. Working was a real challenge this summer for both my husband and myself. We earn the lion's share of our income through doing remodeling and cleaning of mobile homes which are vacant and seldom have power or water on, so no A/C and those tin boxes turn into furnaces once the sun comes up. I've been painting for the last few days, doing the interior of a trailer or two but today... it's raining. Not such a great kind of day to paint - it's too dark inside, and too damp. But later we're going to our church to hang som...
Read more