Satan wants to cover you in spiders and twirl his handlebar mustache.

One of my least favorite things in the world: spiritual warfare. Only what stinks even worse about it is that it always keeps coming back. It's a pattern. I'm exuberant with the thought of God, and then the warfare creeps right back up on me, and then it repeats again and again. Personally, I picture spiritual warfare as a ton of spiders that just crawl all over you. You feel it and it gives you a serious case of the heebie jeebies and you try to fight it off by doing random motions that pretty much do nothing.

How I feel with spiders is how I feel with spiritual warfare. When I have a spider on me (*gags*), I jerk my arms around and jump up and down and pretty much do whatever I can to attempt to get the stupid spider off (I really hope an army of spiders doesn't come and attack me now for revenge...). Usually, I'm so consumed with getting the darn thing off that I don't think about the motions I make before I make them. I rely on knee jerk reactions to get me through instead of trying to calmly think things over.

When I am being spiritually attacked, I don't think. I act, and instead of it actually helping, I wind up not only feeling stupid for jumping around trying to get rid of it, but feeling weak from unneeded effort. Why? Because when spiritual warfare creeps up on me, the rest of my thoughts disappear. It's just me and the warfare spiders. I become so consumed with how much it freaks me out, I forget that if I just stayed still and thought about it, the solution would be clear.

Now, I really wish there was a universal solution to getting rid of spiritual warfare, but there isn't. We're attacked in different ways since Satan knows what makes us tick. He pushes our buttons and loves watching us squirm. Every time I imagine Satan engaging me in spiritual warfare, I imagine him twirling a handlebar mustache (Don't ask me why I imagine him with a mustache. I think it's because in a ton of old movies, the villain has a handlebar mustache...) and maniacally laughing while saying, "Release the spiders!"

Am I the only one who finds that image intensely creepy? I mean, seriously. Satan is already the epitome of creepy, so Satan + Handlebar mustache + Spiritual spiders = Ridiculously bad. The only thing creepier to me is if Satan was a clown. Because, you know, clowns are supposed to be so happy and cool, when really they're just completely terrifying. (Plus, every time I think of clowns, I imagine a clown with really scary make up widening his eyes and slowly moving closer to me....or doing this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFHBtu6Nb40)


Off of the subject of my coulrophobia... Satan wants to watch you squirm. He wants to cover you in spiders and twirl his mustache. He wants to watch you flail. He wants to see you suffer.

Well, honestly, Satan has been getting that out of me lately. He's been attacking me again and again, and I don't stop and think. I don't stop and pray. I rely on my knee jerk reactions. I try to shake off the spiders.

If anything kills me, it will be spiritual warfare. Not some Janjaweed rebel strolling into Africa with the intent of randomly massacring everyone they see. Not disease. Not a freak accident. It will be spiritual warfare. I'd rather die any other way a thousand times than "die" of spiritual warfare. All of those other things are physical deaths, whereas spiritual warfare is spiritual death (Obviously, sense the term is "spiritual death").

I consider my Faith the epitome of two things: Strength and weakness. My Faith is strong and extremely fragile at the same time. This is why I am so terrified of spiritual warfare; it could shatter my Faith, and my Faith is who I am. I am nothing without it. Trust me, I've lived without it before. It hardly constituted a life. I felt empty, like something was missing. And obviously, something was missing: Me.

Spiritual warfare is my worst enemy, aside from Satan himself. I always mess up when I try to fix it, and I always feel bad because of that screw up to the point where it just makes the spiritual warfare worse. I turn into one giant ball of turmoil. That turmoil shakes me to my core every time, and since my Faith is already fragile, I seize up in the fear that my Faith may shatter. If my Faith shatters, I shatter. Period.

I wish that I could tell you a sure fire way for how to get rid of spiritual warfare immediately, but I can't. Satan attacks us in different ways because it hurts him when we follow God. Satan wants us, and not in a good way (As I previously stated in one of my recent posts).

The moral of this is: Don't freak out from the heebie jeebies the spiritual spiders give you. Turn to God. He can make the spiders go away. Don't be like me. Think before you try to shake the warfare off of you. Don't allow Satan to twirl his handlebar mustache. Make him want you even more because he can't have you. Essentially, tease Satan with your Faith in God. He'll hate it. He'll keep trying to put spiders on you, but you don't have to let him succeed. Don't succumb to the fear. (Wow, all of these sentences were extremely short. I can feel my inner English lover blanching.)

You're stronger than you think, and you're bigger than the spiders.