The Roar WithinEsimerkki

Day Six: Counted As Warriors

We must create a place so safe that men can share, cry, and grieve, and still be counted as warriors.

At some point in our lives, our private struggles will become too much. When this happened to me, the feelings of despair were so heavy that an elephant couldn’t carry them on its back. For any man, being honest with yourself and others takes more than just bravery; it takes fully trusting God with your whole self. But here’s the thing: there’s almost always a little truth mixed in with the enemy’s lies. That’s how he gets us to buy into them in the first place. 

There are times when all the renewing of your mind you can do and all the scriptural prescriptions you can come up with don’t fix the problem. You find yourself on a cliff, and the only thing keeping you from going over the edge is trusting God—trusting that God is who He says He is, and trusting that you are who God says you are.

I reached out to my close friend and pastor, Keith, to let him know what was happening with me, not because he needed to know but because I needed to throw the lies—not myself—over the cliff by verbalizing and unpacking them with someone I trusted. 

The first honesty reveal was, “I feel hopeless.” Feeling hopeless wasn’t the lie; that was just a feeling. The lie was that I should feel hopeless, because I was hopeless. But why did I feel that way? Because I wasn’t making the money I thought I should be making at my age, I’d been through a divorce, I was hurting, my kids were hurting, some people close to me had turned their backs on me, and more.

Shame was stalking me. I had been getting my “good enough”—my sense of worth— from the wrong places, and was left feeling hopeless when those things or people didn’t deliver. The truth is that my hope is in the resurrected Christ. He is my hope. I never need to feel hopeless.

Replacing the lies with truth gets rid of the lies, but in order to really heal, we also need to grieve the very real losses tangled in with the lies. 

Where in your life right now are you struggling? What lie about your worth, your identity, needs taking down?