facing your demons
It is a furnace, it is in this place we face our demons. You know when you are alone, truly alone, you find out how much you can’t stand being alone. Alone with your thoughts, alone with your insecurities, alone with the realities of the parts of you inside poking their heads out to remind you that they are still there and you can’t ignore them when you are alone. You must get around people and be busy- distracted, in order to ignore the existence of these demons.
Of course I’m not talking about literal ghouls, these are realities of your flesh, your carnal thoughts, your sinful desires, your anger, your pride, your selfishness, they are ghouls personified. I have faced off with them, seen their ugly faces and the very being of their presence.
There was a place I traveled to a few years ago on a spiritual journey. While I was there, I encountered such as these everyday. They were like parts of me, and parts of evil, like little seeds that germinated and grew over years, like weeds growing under the foundation of the house. A little bit of the plant budding through the wooden floor boards, and you pull it up thinking that you got rid of it, but if you lift up the floorboard you see the incredible overwhelming vines underneath, completely entangled, and you can not even see their breadth or depth.
I experienced something like this in my garden…
I wanted to clear out a section so that I could plant vegetables one spring. I began yanking out the weeds and vines that were taking over. I pulled this vine out of the ground only to discover that there were so many more than I could see above ground. As I ripped them out I found that they led to a tree in the front of the house. These vines were actually tree roots underground that were popping up around my entire property. Finally I gave up. I realized that it was an endless chore. I would never get them all up and everyone I pulled only led to more and more to pull.
This is the place (spiritually) I found myself in. I think I may have just built my house on top of them because the task of pulling them all out was too great. And after all, if I could no longer see them, then they didn’t exist right?
When you are in the place of solitude however, you see these things. The areas of your garden you ignored, overlooked, or ‘saved’ for later to deal with. Well, later is here. And it’s time to deal with them, because they are taking over the rest of the garden and I have run out of clear patches to plant things.
Solitude is the place of surgery
I’d say this place of Solitude, is even where I am ministering to my own heart. I am facing my ‘demons’, and truly having to rely on God’s strength because I literally can not rip these roots out. I have no props, no gifts or abilities in my human strength that can do this great work. It is like removing cancer from your optical nerve and retaining your sight- only a specialist can perform such a surgical task! Only God can remove the entangled demons from my soul while preserving my love, righteousness, peace, and anything good- that is Christ in me- in the process.
Solitude is a place of surgery. It requires someone qualified and steady to remove every evil abscess from my soul. Only Jesus. Only Jesus.
This is a much forgotten discipline of the modern believer, but the desert fathers and mothers truly understood this; prayer is not just talking. We must find places where we can be completely alone in silence and solitude. This is the place where real healing and change occurs in our inner man.
SUGGESTED RESOURCE ON THE TOPIC OF SOLITUDE
Every year I re-read “The Way of the Heart”, by Henry Nouwen. This book is very short and simple, but oh so rich. A long forgotten discipline of the spiritual ones, something to consider in such a loud and busy world.
MORE on Solitude by Henri Nouwen: HENRINOUWEN.ORG