The enemy is not your friend.
Well, that seems a bit self-evident, doesn't it? But, think about it a bit. Don’t we often see those who are our 'friends'...as the enemy in things that we are feeling about life? For example, we act like our spouses are sometimes the enemy. Someone at work or church, or a neighbor; we sometimes view as an enemy. Many times whoever is not cooperating with my sense of how life should work to benefit me...is thought of as someone to oppose, like an enemy. Someone we need to stand up for ourselves against. And, we can live a long time with such a view of others.
But, what if 'they' aren’t really the problem we can often think they are? What if they are being used by a real enemy to keep our attention distracted from where the real battle is?
We all have a sense of things we need to fight for...some are good and some aren't. But, what if the object of our fight is not the other person, at any given moment? What if the battle is really at a much different level? What if we are simply being led to believe the problem is with the other person...to keep us focused on a level of fight that we think we can win, with our own effort, with our own ingenuity? Believing that if we could just change them, if they would just change, if they would stop or start doing this or that, then everything would be OK. What if the real struggle, though, in them or in us is really with something else, but we live largely unaware that this is true? What if the nature of our effort could really be more about what we turn to than about who we turn on?
Perhaps, the enemy is not really...our friend, after all.
