Sometimes it feels like God is silently for you and the whole world is loudly against you.
It’s taken me a long time to realize this: My enemies are mostly in my head. I mean this in two ways:
First, I’m making a lot of it up. The world is not really conspiring against me. I’m not truly that important; I’m not on other peoples’ minds nearly as much as I assume.
Second, my real enemies are not “out there” but “in here.” My worst enemies are my own thoughts. Those negative and adversarial voices in my own mind. Whether the echoes of people who have hurt me in the past, demons messing with my thoughts, or my own imaginative negativity bias—they’re not actually what one might call “real.” They pose no real threat to me beyond me feeling that they do.
You know those old westerns, or cartoons, where things go quiet and a tumbleweed blows across the screen? Rolling and bouncing, pushed by the wind until it’s out of frame, as a strange minor-key whistle sounds in the distance? They really do that—although not usually with the whistle. I grew up in the southwest and have seen it with my own eyes. A tumbleweed is a thorny scrub brush that breaks off from its root in maturity and gets blown around by the wind, (which is how it scatters its seeds).
All those negative enemies in your head that make you feel like the whole world is against you? Scrub thistles. Lots of thorns; short life span. Big drama; little danger. Learn to pray this from Psalm 83:
Make them like tumbleweed, my God,
like chaff before the wind.
And then listen for God whistling in the silence.
See Psalm 83:1-4, 13-18