See the Fight

Posted on October 22, 2008 12:00 AM MST by Tiffany Kinerson

"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against ...the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."
  --Ephesians 6:12

Houston got slapped upside the head last month with Category-2 Hurricane Ike. You should have seen the preparations that went on around the north side of Houston. We packed the grocery stores, focused on the canned food section and the bottled water aisle. The streets rang out with pounding hammers and whining saws through the days as we hung boards across our windows and built safe rooms for our children.

It was a little eerie.

At the same time it was exciting. We tracked the storm as it grew closer. I gathered the boys around websites with names like StormTracker. And my husband introduced the boys to The Scorpions' Rock You like a Hurricane, which we heard over and over and over again. Our first hurricane as a family. Momentous.

I'd say that my little guys were quite brave as the storm rolled in and we bundled them up into our bedroom for the night, just steps away from the safe room we'd created in the walk-in closet. The boys saw it as an adventure while the lights were on and we showed them flashlights we'd hid beside them just in case.

But then the wind blew and--blip--no more power. We were in the dark, and we were suddenly cut-off from the peace of even looking one another in the eyes. The storm was not on its way anymore. It was here. And it was very real.

My oldest son started to cry. He tried to be brave, but there's just such a hubbub surrounding a storm the size of Colorado. It kind of gets to a kid who's hardly the size of a dining room chair.

So my husband and I conferred together. Hey, we thought, why don't we just show them what the storm really looks like? Give the boys some reality to douse the teeth and claws in their imaginations. "Do you want to see the storm?"

Two little heads with hair on end nodded, disbelief rimming their mouths. Would they really go out into the wild storm outside? With Mom and Dad's blessing?

My husband and I each hiked a child onto a hip and traipsed into the wind. The moon was almost full but completely hidden behind clouds that rolled and boiled above us. The jet stream blew in a circular pattern just like the storm pictures we'd watched, and the boys said, "Cool!" They took their first bold steps on the concrete. All alone, with the storm raging around them. And an amazing thing happened after that.

They danced and played on the driveway. Unafraid.

Several years ago I was afraid like my boys in their sleeping bags. My husband was deployed, the winds of war threatened to take off with him and carry him from me into eternity. And my stomach boiled and churned, my head pounded, and even my blood seemed to catch in my throat in a dam of stress, then release out of sheer will to flood my brain with a head rush. It was eerie.

Who would've thought that I, of all the children in my family, would be the one who received the hand-me-down anti-blessing of my mother's debilitating migraines, my father's battles with vascular disease and the family propensity toward colitis and ulcers? And all that during the very time my health was needed most to raise my babies.

But there I was falling into the same family patterns of sickness. So I started to cry out. Because, you know, there's such a hubbub around genetic disorders these days, and it kind of gets to a woman who's hardly more than a double helix of DNA.

So then God conferred with me. He said, "Hey, your struggle is not against flesh and blood...."

And I said, "Oh."

Then I thought about it. What are the chances that I'd get every single ailment that rolled and boiled in my family history? Not very great.

And God's jet stream of hope blew through me in a circular pattern.

Then I took my first bold step toward my own battle. I called out, "God, if ailment is Your device to teach me, then I accept it. But if this is merely the Enemy, as You spoke of in Your Word, then I ask You to fight the powers in the heavenly realms for me. Free me."

At that moment, the headache cleared, and the colitis tendencies disappeared. My husband was still gone and the storm of war still raged across the ocean. But an amazing thing happened after that.

I danced and played with My Father's blessing. Free from a storm I only feared when I couldn't see it. Unafraid when the teeth and claws were finally revealed.

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