The Battle for Your Life

In recent weeks I’ve been reminded that most people are fighting battles of one sort or another. Sometimes the battles are real life-and-death dramas where they are fighting to survive a disease or keep a family together, and sometimes the battles are against emotions and thoughts that threaten their desire to continue living. Most of us fight battles against impediments to the meaningful life we all want. The point is, we’re all engaged in a battle against or for something, mainly ourselves.

“Life as a Battle” is a radical idea in America. Author Gary Barkalow says we’ve all bought into the idea that life should be like we’re on a cruise ship. If the weather is cold and rainy with rolling seas that make us ill, and we’re served bland, lukewarm food, then we feel like we got a raw deal. But if we understand life as a war, and we’re living on a battleship, then it changes our perspective on these things.

You start by changing your thinking about life. Most people view life as something to survive. A few view it as a game or competition with winners and losers, with the ultimate goal of accruing more wins. I believe life is a battle for our identities, for the sum and substance of who we are, for what the bible calls our souls.

Years ago, I studied the book of Job in the bible. Job has lots of important ideas for living a life that’s a battle for yourself. When the story opens Satan enters God’s throne room and God starts expressing his love for Job and his delight in who Job is. That’s Idea One: Your Life has Value.

To survive the battle for your life you need to know, in your core, that your life has a value that’s not based on what you do or bring to the world, but based on who you are. I saw this truth when Parkinson’s Disease stripped away my father’s abilities – a smart, athletic, personable, and loving guy who excelled at sales and friendship. Although he retained the core of his personality to the end, the disease took much of what he’d come to think of as himself. Still, he never lost the cornerstone of his identity: that he was deeply loved and important to the one(s) that mattered most.

Idea Two: There are forces at work that don’t want you to survive the battle. The name Satan means “accuser” in the original Hebrew, and from the beginning of Job’s story this character levels accusations at Job. Whether we believe in the story, or even the bible, each of us has experienced accusing thoughts and misgivings about whether we can survive the battles of life.

Often these are doubts and fears we harbor about our abilities or the significance of our lives in the world. Psychologist Albert Ellis went so far as to say most people live their lives to prevent these doubts and fears from being proved true – living on defense, as it were. Fear is big business. The Media and Marketers count on our fears to keep us engaged (to sell ads) and to buy their products to protect us from what we fear.

The only way to fight fear is with truth and certainty. Not the so-called “your truth” that’s based on individual beliefs that come and go, but the kind of truth that based on experienced fact. This is truth we learn by testing what we fear is true to see if it’s real or just imagined.

That takes us to Idea Three: We learn what’s really true by living through battles that test our courage and character. Some battles we enter voluntarily – we run a marathon, camp in the wilderness, choose to become parents, etc. – but many come on us without warning or our willingness. Job’s fear was that God loved him because he was religiously observant (Job 3:25), so he struggled when bad things happened to him despite his righteous living. But God used Job’s trials to reveal Job’s fear and the truth that Job’s circumstances had nothing to do with God’s love for him but everything with who Job was supposed to become.

That’s Idea Four: Our battles are necessary for us to become who we were designed to be. Humility, compassion, gratitude, selflessness – characteristics like these aren’t in us without going through battles. Character that can withstand battles and storms can’t be taught, it must be formed within us. Job’s friends were full of hypothetical knowledge “about God”, but Job’s battles brought him into a personal relationship with God so he truly “knew God”.

Our battles teach us, as only life in the trenches can, who we really are and what is verifiably true. It’s crazy to go looking for them, but when they come (as they will) we can be assured there is something worthwhile to be gained by living through them – they give us our best chance to become who we were meant to be. Our battles are our opportunities to become our best selves.