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?
“To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. This requires not only courage but also a strong faith. As hard as it is to believe that the dry desolate desert can yield endless varieties of flowers, it is equally hard to imagine that our loneliness is hiding unknown beauty. The movement from loneliness to solitude, however, is the beginning of any spiritual life because it is a movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.”
This quote from one of my favorite books, The Way of the Heart, reminds me that there is inner work to be done that can only happen in the place of solitude, and it is rewarding work. It is the only place where the beauty of who you really are, and were created to be, can be seen, and that… is a very good thing. 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
This place of Solitude is where I minister to my own heart. It is where I face my ‘demons’, and truly have to rely on God’s strength because I literally can not rip these roots out. I have no gifts or abilities in my human strength that can do this great work. It is like removing cancer from your optic nerve and still retain your sight- only a highly expertised specialist can perform such a surgical task! Likewise, 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 incredibly steady and trustworthy 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 (more about different types of prayer in my book Prayer Foundations). 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.
[addition October 26, 2024]
Every year I re-read the book The Way of the Heart, and I take inventory of my time spent in silence and solitude. It still remains a daunting task to find time to sit in silence and/or solitude. I have not attained this discipline as I so often have preached, however I have learned that it doesn’t have to be as religiously scheduled as I used to think it was. See I have this neurological condition where if I am sitting still in silence I will just fall right to sleep, sometimes literally just pass out. Learning this explained why I unconsciously have always had to be active in some way during prayer, worship or Bible study time. My brain never feels rested and always wants to sleep.
Due to this, and lifestyle of being a busy mom, I have had to take advantage of opportunities like being alone in the car on a drive - sitting in the silence in the car. Arriving early to pick one of the kids up from school, rolling down the windows and listening to the birds while i just sit, instead of scrolling through my phone while I am waiting. Even in doctors offices I can just get my head into a meditative space while I wait. It has become this mental workout I am doing, like a micro-solitude workout. Taking moments, going inside myself, and just being quiet.
There is a time to deal with the issues of your heart, and there is a time to sit and just allow the silence to heal you. To allow yourself to stop replaying all of the coulda-woulda-shoulda’s, the regrets, the scenarios of the past and overthinking the possibilities of the future, and just coming. to. a. halt. This is where faith takes over, trusting that God is working. Sitting in silence- solitude, is an act of faith in itself. It is an act of trusting in God’s ability, not mine.
A final note; this has been the verse, the mantra, the broken record in my head for the last 2 years- and it still is, it is still “knock me of my chair” profound today just as it was when it slapped me in the face a few years ago, and I will leave you with this verse. I pray for rest and healing in the place of solitude for anyone reading this.
“O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you that you should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed among you as crucified? This only I want to learn from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?”
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