By Karen Swank
You wouldn’t love me if you really knew me.
If I told who I really am and all I’ve done, you’d run the other way.
If I shared my feelings with you, your lips would peel back in disgust and you’d scurry off to tell someone better.
If I laid down this everything’s-okay facade and shared the pain on my heart, you’d call me pathetic and find a friend more interesting or at least less dreary.
Lies hold us captive every day. They drive us to paste on a smile when we’re falling apart, and to send our secrets to the deepest, darkest recesses of our hearts, where we can hide them even from ourselves. They push us to pretend, to cover up, to deny.
We all have a common enemy who wraps himself in lies. We see him as a character from a comic strip, complete with red jumpsuit and pitchfork, doing battle with the wimpy little angel on the other shoulder by simply making more interesting suggestions.
If we move past the lies that deem him imaginary or harmless, perhaps we believe another lie that says everything he does is ugly and obvious…easy to detect as evil. This belief ignores the fact that he started out as the highest of angels before making choices that catapulted him to hell, and leaves us vulnerable to believing that if something seems spiritual and beautiful, it must be true and from God. Today’s world is filled with many very spiritual, very beautiful lies which make men their own gods and conveniently leave out the Truth which is Christ.
On the opposite end of th e spectrum is the perspective that makes our enemy what he always wanted to be: all-seeing, all-knowing, all-present…equal to or greater than God…some sort of ever-present malignant force that cannot be halted even by Holy Spirit working within us. Only One knows the number of hairs on your head and every thought that crosses your mind…only the One who can be trusted with this information…only the One who breathed life into you, and who knew the number of your days before you were born.
Lies, lies, lies. The enemy of us all creates lies, feeds on lies, perpetuates lies. Lies are his favorite tool for stealing our joy, killing our purpose, and destroying our unity. He uses them to drive us deep into ourselves, and to divide us from one another.
He seduces us into embracing what will harm us and rejecting what will make us whole and well.
He spoon-feeds us lies, and all too often we open our mouths and swallow.
He offers us secrecy, and all too often we believe it is a shelter, rather than a snare.
The truth, though, is that we don’t have to buy something just because the enemy is selling it, nor accept what he’s giving us “for free.” Freedom in Christ affords us liberty from the lies that suck the joy out of our days. Trusting God means we can share who we are, how we feel, and where we’ve been. We invite the light of His Truth in, and it slays every dark thing masquerading as beauty even as it draws life upward, outward, into full bloom.
If you’ve let Him into your heart and life, you are among the children of light (and if you haven’t, you have a standing invitation to enter in).
Just for today, let’s disarm some of the most wicked weapons in the arsenal of the enemy of us all: lies and secrecy.
Just for today, let’s be real. Whoever you’ve been and whatever you’ve done, He can use it all for good…
…but first you must bring it into the light.
Karen is from Aledo, IL. She went to Monmouth College and studied Latin and English. She is a biological mom of two children and surrogate mom/friend/advocate for a whole host of children. She would like to meet every wounded soul that I’ve she’s ever known… as a child, before the “damage was done” so she could tell them how much they are loved.