Feeling Assaulted

Some difficult stuff, mistakes I've made come back to me, feeling helpless in the face of other people's problems, stuff like that, has come up recently. It feels like I'm being assaulted right now. Cue the terrible, aching nightmares and difficult visions. As I fall asleep I'm overwhelmed by all manner of imps and demons. Praying helps. So does meditation, but still the whole thing makes my life rather difficult.

One way I handle these situations is by reflecting upon them. Even the most difficult of times can  make for some interesting reflection. This is certainly NOT 'the most difficult time', but some parts of my life suck right now and I'm trying to discern God's Will within it. I don't have any easy answers to this, and that is frustrating and a little scary and that is enough to make life, which is often tough even for the most blest among us, a little more difficult. So I think about it all, not so much to try to make sense of it as to box it in, to distance myself from it.

The thing that strikes me most about it all is how much it feels like an assault. For me, bad times never just feel like bad times. They never feel like I'm just feeling bad. They feel like an assault by demons and darkness, like evil itself is a physical force that has crept into my life. I don't think this frees me of responsibility. The sin that comes back to haunt me is often my own sin. The point is that my sin ACTS as if it has come to life, like evil itself has a ghost that comes to haunt you. I cannot imagine how people can experience life as it is and not come to the conclusion that something very much like the devil exists. It seems obvious to me, now.

I once tried to deny this experience, to rationalize, to psychologize it, to reduce it to something like a feeling or simply my own moral failing. But the more I tried to deny it, the more powerful it got. At least now I can call down the power of Heaven like a weapon and do battle, which gets me some relief and eventually helps me find my way back into the light. When I thought it was all about my own mind, I looked at that kind of activity as superstition or a moral failing, and would try to convince myself that what was happening was 'not real' or 'all in my head'. The more you tried to clamp it down, the more it just popped up. Only when I started treating it as a war did I ever win any battles.