How does one fight a battle against unseen forces? It helps to know some of the enemy’s strategies. Once you know the strategies, the players begin to emerge, and as the players emerge, you know who and what to resist. What has been so heartbreaking for me in this war we have been forced into, is that I was disappointed and heartbroken, disgusted and abhorred by the players. There are the active players who create the strategies of war and gather their enforcers, there are the enforcers, there are the blackmailed, compromised, complicit pawns in the war, and there are protectors, defenders and liars in place to keep the war perpetuating. Then there are the ignorant, who, not wanting to rock the boat, or learn things that would shake their paradigm, keep their eyes closed as the victims fall by the hundreds of thousands, and before long, millions.

The evil is so vast, so corrupt, so ancient, so generational, and so pervasive that as a Believer in Truth, it is hard to think there is anything I can do about it. I am not minimizing prayer here as that is one of our greatest weapons against evil as Ephesians 6 tells us who our enemies are. Taking up the shield of faith and the Sword of the Spirit is also part of our arsenal. Then there is the instruction to “Stand”. What does it mean to stand?

I think Shadrack, Meshack and Abednego and Daniel could tell us what standing looks like. It means not eating from the King’s table when it violates one’s conscience. It means refusing to bow when the music plays, or show any reverence for the idol in front of you. It looks like opening the windows to your home and praying three times a day even when a “temporary” decree forbids that kind of intimate communion with God. Standing looks like action.

I traversed the rabbit holes of the enemies plots and schemes, and for the past three years I have mourned and wept over what I did not know, what I ignorantly supported, what I had refused to look at, and what I refused to hear. In vain, it felt, I tried to warn others of the plots unfolding, and the steps being taken. Like many others, I spent hours, and days in prayer and intercession, weeping, praying, asking God for strategy, help, forgiveness, and wisdom to walk out of this siege.

God began releasing the tongues of victims to be able to speak and He introduced me to a few. One I had known for years, but never heard her story. One I had only known a few months, but became so dear to my heart. Their stories were what I would have considered unbelievable five years ago, but after all God has brought to light, their stories are sadly more common than I ever knew. I wept.

There is no need to become an expert in evil, since evil will invent new ways to be abhorrent every time you turn your head, but that is still no reason to be ignorant of the devil’s schemes. A friend asked me “What does it matter if I learn what the Enemy is up to? He has been at it for thousands of years? How would that change what I do on a day to day basis which is to love my family and love my neighbor?” It was a sincere question. For me the answer was, “It would change everything.” Because for me it did.

If you watch the movie “The Sound of Freedom” you will get an introduction to some of the evil we haven’t “seen”. If you begin asking the hard questions, you will find your strategies for not only getting yourself out of the siege of ignorance, but taking your families and neighbors with you. You have to be willing to be offended, disillusioned, deeply saddened, repentant, and willing to do something different. It’s not just the lust-driven man or woman in an obscure neighborhood that participates in evil. You will find out that possibly one or more of your favorite singers, actors, preachers, presidents, priests, gurus, politicians, churches, social movements, universities, professors, educational programs, school boards, unions, lodges, clothing designers, fast food restaurants, military branches, television networks, newscasters, theme parks, talk-show hosts, professional athletes, sports teams, therapists, jewelers, game developers, local and federal government agencies, morticians, car salesmen, doctors, surgeons and pharmacists are active participants in the evil. It is organized, it is extensive, and it is right under our noses.

If you ask the hard questions, you will meet the victims. Some have been trafficked through churches. Some satanically abused at the hands of medical professionals in “secret meetings”. Many will tell you of the networks that stretch throughout their home towns. Those who have so far survived the horrors might be the one sitting next to you in church, or work at your place of employment. They might be living on the streets of your city, or living a lifestyle that they hope will numb the memories. They must be believed and we must learn how our ignorance gave their perpetrators power. And we must change.

The Bible calls it repentance. Turning away from the sin and turning towards God. We must allow our eyes to follow His. We must bypass the food on the “King’s table”–the things we believe we deserve, even though it is rich, and delicious, and we have access to it. We must live by a different social, spiritual, and even in many cases, physical diet. We must ignore edicts that are designed to separate us from God and we must bravely face the consequences of our actions. We must pray. Crying out to God for mercy, protection, strategy and wisdom for our world, our nations, our cities, our neighbors, our families and for ourselves, is the beginning of intercession. And then we “having done all to stand, (must) stand firm.” Stand in the street, stand in the furnace. Stand in the palace and stand in the lion’s den. Stand between the victim and the perpetrator. We must all learn to stand.

CHAPTER 2

Joram, the son of Ahab and Jezebel, had a very frustrating reign as king over the Northern Kingdom of Israel in Samaria. Like his parents before him, Joram wanted to be the supreme ruler over Israel without a relationship with the God who formed, rescued, and preserved that nation. He even resented that God gave wisdom to the prophet Elisha, because it forced him to listen to a man of God for insight.

Maybe he mirrored what his parents modeled, maybe he decided for himself; whatever the story, King Joram lived with a chip on his shoulder regarding God and His prophets. It was convenient to blame them for any negative consequences that resulted from his own poor decisions.

For at least seven years, a famine assailed the land of Israel and Samaria. Attempting to use the famine to their advantage, enemy armies of the nation of Aram planned several attacks on Israel. Miraculously, many of their raids were foiled because God revealed their strategies to the prophet Elisha, who in turn alerted King Joram.

But when God warned King Joram and he refused to listen, God did not intervene. King Ben-Hadad, the king of Aram, mobilized his entire army to lay siege on Samaria–and this time he succeeded.¹

Ben-Hadad’s army used intimidation to help execute their siege: they paraded their military strength; they shouted threats. Then they backed up their threats with actions. They succeeded in cutting off the flow of goods and services coming into and going out of Samaria, a strategy that exacerbated the conditions of the famine within Samaria’s walls and left Israel in dire circumstances with rapidly dwindling resources.

The army of Aram’s goal was to let starvation begin to force Israel’s hand in surrender, and the strategy was working. Food became so scarce within the city walls, people ate the dung of doves and butchered their service animals, eating every edible part. Any kind of sustenance sold for an exorbitant price, leaving the inhabitants without the ability to buy anything to eat. We are told “the siege lasted so long that a donkey’s head sold for eighty shekels² of silver and a quarter of a cab³ of seed pods for five sheckles.^5,6

Aram’s military threat was real. It was not a figment of Israel’s imagination; however; the effects of this siege began to work their way into the minds of the victims in ways even Ben-Hadad couldn’t have predicted.

As hopelessness and despair dug in its talons, the imaginations of men and women twisted and succumbed to its devastation. The consequences of this siege on Samaria became incalculable and unconscionable as the hope of those living within the walls of the city dissipated.

It’s not as if they hadn’t been warned. Generations before, Moses forewarned the Israelites of what would happen if they decided to shift their trust from God to idols:

The Lord will bring a nation against you from far away, from the ends of the earth, like an eagle swooping down, a nation whose language you will not understand, a fierce-looking nation without respect for the old or pity for the young. They will devour the young of your livestock and the crops of your land until you are destroyed. They will leave you no grain, new wine or olive oil, nor any calves of your herds or lambs of your flocks until you are ruined. They will lay siege to all the cities throughout your land until the high fortified walls in which you trust fall down. They will besiege all the cities throughout the land the Lord your God is giving you. Because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege, you will eat the fruit of the womb, the flesh of the sons and daughters the Lord your God has given you. Even the most gentle and sensitive man among you will have no compassion on his own brother or the wife he loves or his surviving children, and he will not give to one of them any of the flesh of his children that he is eating. It will be all he has left because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege of your cities. The most gentle and sensitive woman among you–so sensitive and gentle that she would not venture to touch the ground with the sole of her foot–will begrudge the husband she loves and her own son or daughter the afterbirth from her womb and the children she bears. For in her dire need she intends to eat them secretly because of the suffering your enemy will inflict on you during the siege of your cities.⁷

Just as Moses warned, two women with sons in the city of Samaria made a last-ditch effort for survival; they struck a deal with each other that would reveal how hopelessness, once internalized, destroys. We learn of this gruesome story and how it played out when one pleads with King Joram for justice:

As the king of Israel was passing by on the wall, a woman cried to him, “Help me, my lord the King!” The king replied, “If the Lord does not help you, where can I get help for you? From the threshing floor? From the winepress?” Then he asked her, “What’s the matter?” She answered, “This woman said to me, ‘Give up your son so we may eat hin,’ but she had hidden him.” When the king heard the woman’s words, he tore his robes. As he went along the wall, the people looked and they saw that, under his robes, he had sackcloth on his body.⁸

Until you experience hopelessness, you really cannot imagine the options for escape the enemy will parade in front of you. So many ideas can boast of relieving your pain but ultimately end in addiction, isolation, and death. In a famine, feces become a feast and anything you value quickly becomes a bartering chip for a fix.

Desperation has a way of blurring the lines of the precious and the temporary fix like nothing else can. As this story illustrates so well, values can quickly become subjective and the profane can be served up as a banquet. The women struck a deal that left one child dead, two stomachs churning, and a crisis of justice that could not be resolved this side of heaven. Our enemy never offers real hope. He can’t. There’s no hope in him.

The siege not only happened outside the walls of the city of Samaria, it infiltrated the minds of its inhabitants–even the king. King Joram became so over-wrought with the news the women brought him. Things had been bad in his city, but this–this reeked of despair that rots the soul. He had no answers. He tore his clothes in anguish.

How could a mother agree to give up her own son to cannibalism? Did it seem more merciful to kill her child swiftly rather than watch him languish in starvation and die as many around them had already done? Did she reason he was near dead anyway and his body could save the lives of others? Did she attempt to back out or otherwise question her decision?

We do not know the thoughts that went through her head; we cannot answer for her choices. We can, however, answer for our own. The Holy Spirit can help us turn those questions inward to investigate our own hopeless thoughts.

ENCIRCLED

Growing up in a home with physical, verbal, and emotional abuse, there are things I heard and experienced repetitively. The combination of threats and painful actions, compounded over sixteen years, formed a framework of fear in which I lived.

The enemy always seemed near–and powerful. He convinced me I was always a victim. Anything that triggered my fear left me feeling trapped, even when I had options for help. Once I believed there was no hope, it made it easier for Satan to convince me I needed to stop the merry-go-round of my life by ending it. Satan was the one marching in circles around my mind, but he convinced me I too was stuck in those circles.

Perhaps you can relate. Perhaps you too know what it’s like for thoughts to run endless circles, to believe you can’t break free. Your mind is stuck on “repeat.” Your thoughts are hopeless, and your emotions join the dirge. No matter how much you want to think about something else, your thoughts travel the well-worn path of fear, stress, anxiety, discouragement, doubt, anger, and bitterness.

You may describe it as a spinning vortex of despair or liken it to an endless broken record. I call it a siege. Like the warriors of the armies of Aram circling the city of Samaria, the enemy marches his lies in circles around our thoughts until he’s captured our imaginations.

When we begin to feel hopeless and caught in something inescapable, that’s when we’re prone to believe his lies, because they’re on a constant broadcast. And it’s in our weakest moments the enemy attempts to strike the most damaging of deals.

DESPERATION

When our thoughts are discouraging, when the music we listen to, the conversations we have, and the news we let into our hearts only speak of pain and hardship, we begin to despair. Despair is an utter loss of hope.⁹ A loss of all hope becomes a famine of the soul that depletes our energy. We lose the will to fight, to create solutions or to alter our course. This in turn can create feelings of panic that compel us to make quick decisions that look good in the short-term but aren’t always good in the long-term.

Always looking for an opportune time, Satan often introduces his destructive thoughts at the stage of our siege when we feel like we are out of solutions. He does this in hopes that we will think his thoughts are our own ideas and will act on them. Once we entertain and internalize his thoughts, the actions that flow from them become our responsbility.

The thing is, desperation settles in through many avenues. Some of our most painful experiences are not great, repetitive events; they’re seemingly small, isolated moments that take on fearful lives of their own…

“No one will ever want you.”

That was said to me only once, but it took root in my adolescent soul and became an imaginary army that marched around my identity for years. I believed it. The enemy planted a lie and walked away. My imagination took it from there.

That’s the enemy’s strategy. He starts a campaign of fear, through lies, that continues to encircle our minds. Once we internalize the fear, he can walk away for hours, days, even years, certain we’ll be too afraid to “leave the city.” It’s a brilliant form of warfare that can take decades to recognize.

If successful, the enemy’s lies sound like our own thoughts. He’ll tell half-truths, threaten with retaliation, and even flat-out lie to control our identities and decisions. When our own self-talk sounds like self-cursing, it’s an indicator that we have adopted lies and made them our own thoughts.

Sadly, in a siege, we tend to want to fight against hope, resist help, and cower from our strengths; we lean into our weaknesses and give up. If we don’t have truth speaking into our pain, we’ll live in a famine that eats away at our resolve and ultimately our humanity. Truth may be all around us, but the siege keeps it from fully reaching our hearts.

The two women from 2 Kings 6 allowed despair and hopelessness to cloud their vision and muddle their thinking. Desperation tempted them with a damaging escape and a deconstructed hope. We are horrified by their decisions. At times, we should be horrified by our own.

____________________________________________________________________________

¹2 Kings 5:24 NIV

²About 1 kilogram

³About 0.3 liters

⁴From doves’ dung

⁵About 55 grams

⁶2 Kings 6:25

⁷Deuteronomy 28:49-53

⁸2 Kings 6:26-30

⁹Merriam Webster

CHAPTER 1

As a child, I was my father’s favorite–the baby girl. With one older brother almost three years my senior and another in heaven, I was the grand finale (or so my parents thought; my little sister arrived 13 years later).

It didn’t take long to notice how my dad treated my mother. If he wasn’t overpowering her physically, he was using his words to make her feel unlovely, rejected, small and insignificant. He would take her car keys, block exits, or lock her in the house forbidding her to leave and threatening her if she did.

He lived in constant fear of losing power.

No doubt that’s why my older brother became his next target. After all, boys grow up to be men, and men overpower other men. So, my dad devised a plan to ensure his son would never succeed at manhood by using the same methods used on my mother: he belittled him, gave him chore after chore, bullied him, held back his approval, and rarely showed him affection. He was determined to remain dominant and keep my brother subordinate.

To give you an idea, my dad liked to hug me in front of the rest of the family. While he held me, he barked orders to my brother; while he “loved” me, he belittled my brother and called him a failure. This scenario played out time and time again before I could take it no longer. Being dad’s favorite meant praise for me but pain and hardship for my brother and my mom.

So, I formulated a plan to ensure the tides would turn.

I would stop hugging my dad. If he didn’t get hugs from me, he would reach out to my brother and be kinder to my mom; he would notice the deficit of love and realize he needed to do something about it. Once he noticed the loss, I mused, he would begin hugging my brother, and loving my mother–then everything would be even, and I could begin hugging him again. It was a perfect plan.

Of course, I soon discovered you can’t force love. You can’t manipulate kindness out of someone who doesn’t want to give it. You can only strengthen the fear of losing power by changing your role.

That’s when the tables began to turn.

My dad saw my lack of affection as rejection of him, which began to complicate and compound his insecurities. He tried to get back what I withheld. I wouldn’t budge. He became angry. I received his wrath. And although I hated how he treated me, a certain satisfaction arose from knowing my mother and brother were no longer alone. Now we were all on the same playing field.

But in the sixth grade I first uttered the words, “I think I am depressed.”

My parents were separating because of my father’s angry, abusive behavior. While necessary, as a child I wanted their restoration more. My heart was battered and broken from the despair in which we lived–the abuse and the separation seemed to say things would not get better. The prospect of a good life began to falter. Depression filled me with hopelessness and the siege began. The enemy who comes only to kill, steal and destroy worked feverishly to demolish my hope.

A few months later, my parents got back together, hoping to work things out. Unfortunately, my father’s cycle of verbal, physical, and emotional abuse began again. The anger and pain ate away at my desire to live. As a child, I had no power over the situation. There didn’t seem to be any physical escape. I feared losing those closest to me; and ironically, I feared losing my own life even more, knowing the pain it would inflict on others. Yet suicide’s seductive voice swept into our family and began tempting us all.

For reasons only God could orchestrate, none of us could bring ourselves to go through with it. Instead, I entertained thoughts of dying over and over. For hours I meditated on the most effective ways to end my life. My thoughts became so entrenched in death, sometimes I longed to be murdered so my death would not have to come by my own hands. I envisioned myself a victim of horrendous crimes, where relief would come once my life was extinguished.

This perverted way of thinking somehow comforted me in the midst of pain. At the same time, I felt so ashamed because I knew my thoughts weren’t healthy; but in my despair, peace was a state of mind I thought I had to manufacture. Shame quickly hijacked my identity.

“Your existence causes problems and pain for others.”

Like a broken record, this message looped in my head all my life. Somehow, with each statement, my mind produced photos and memories of instances in my life that seemed to validate those words and solidify my belief in their truth.

I reasoned that if my existence creates pain, then my non-existence should remove that pain. My siege was in full force. For the next thirty years, I felt trapped in hopelessness whenever the stresses of life climbed higher. Like a city surrounded by an enemy, I became a victim to the lies that kept me locked in despair.

I didn’t see it coming; I had no idea what the enemy was building in my life all those years. It seemed logical to believe it was just a tough life that wasn’t working out for me. The famine of hope had set in before I realized it was dwindling. And that’s just how the enemy had planned it. Gradual, calculated, determined, and strategic, he slowly built his armament against me and led me to believe I was trapped. If I continued cooperating with his plan, I would surely self-destruct.

To be truly set free, I needed to look hopelessness in the eyes and see my own reflection. If I was really going to fight, I needed to fight with my eyes wide open. My operating assumptions needed to be exposed; my imagination needed a flush.

And I found a catalyst in 2 Kings.

In that particular setting, two women and four lepers stand in the spotlight. Prolonged threats from outside the city gates, combined with famine within, created hopelessness, propelling them to make choices.

You see, the Arameans, an ancient enemy kingdom to Israel, knew how a siege worked best. They wouldn’t have to break down the walls of a fortified city if they could succeed in breaking down the wills of those inside.

The choices made by those women and men made history. I have come to learn that our choices make history too.

I lay there, curled up in a ball on the floor of our bedroom closet–shoes beneath me, clothes dangling above–completely unaware of the physical discomfort. Despair entrenched me. I cried in agony; my whole body ached, and my imagination took center stage. Thoughts and images flashed through my mind in a continuous loop. Here are ways you can kill yourself, they whispered. The feelings of hopelessness felt familiar, like a heavy weight on my mind, and an urgency to end it all began to torment me.

Months of loss culminated in that one day: a friend I thought I had connected with in meaningful ways called to let me know she was dropping me from her life. My marriage continued to struggle from years of financial strain and associated stress, Our family moved, once again, from one city to another for work. I could not seem to propel myself forward with the pain I felt.

There seemed to be no end in sight.

Looking back, I don’t recall what happened that particular day to trigger suicidal thoughts. I only know the cumulative incidents of untended pain came crashing down on me, and I felt myself being pulled under by a despair that threatened no escape.

It began in childhood. An abusive father and the painful family dynamic he created fostered a sense of hopelessness. Despite temporary reprieves, I saw hope as futile. I couldn’t escape–ultimate help was out of reach. Just like that, the enemy began his siege of my mind. Seeds planted in those childhood beliefs grew into choking weeds in my adult years. I learned to survive the wars of my adolescent years, yet I never grew dull to the enemy’s voices and threats. They became part of me in ways I didn’t understand,

There I was, a mother of four, with more blessings than I could count, allowing misery and suicide to cloud my view of the present and future. I desperately needed to escape their grip on my mind.

“Stop, Cate. Reflect for a minute. Don’t go down this path,”

Then it happened. A flash of memory: I sat in a church sanctuary, listening to Daren Lindley preach on the siege of Samaria from 2 Kings 2; as he spoke, the Holy Spirit’s voice took over, calling out my suicidal battles and the thoughts that led me into them.

That memory jolted me and gave me the strength needed to change my direction. The journey that followed is what this book is about. It’s a story of rising and falling, of letting go of lies, and clinging tenaciously to hope. It’s how I learned to question my thoughts before they became actions–because actions cannot be reversed, and the consequences of those actions fall on others as well.

It’s the story of how I learned that even when I feel hopeless, I have decisions to make, and those decisions will either lead me to mercy or death. It’s how I learned that when I am most tempted to throw precious things away, I need a bold courage to change my course of action. And it’s how these lessons became the catalyst for developing a team I can call on when I am afraid–a team who will pray for me and encourage my steps towards help.

While I’ve learned a lot along the way regarding how to cope with life’s disappointments, my story continues to unfold. I hope to take you with me on this journey,

As I write, I picture you: Maybe you’re battling hopelessness and despair or know someone who is. Maybe you don’t know what to do and are being tempted with a quick fix that will ultimately destroy you or something precious to you.

In the pages of this book, I want you to see the direction despair will take you. I want you to hear your enemy’s voice and begin to distinguish it from your own.

More than that, I want you to hear your Maker, your Father God who speaks hope, healing, deliverance, and restoration. His voice is calling you out of your depression and despair and beckoning you His direction. I want you to look confidently into the eyes of the One who knows what to do and knows how to deliver you. Repentance is a turning–turning away from the voice of the enemy, turning to the voice of God, to hear it clearer and clearer and believe what He says.

I pray the Holy Spirit might use 2 Kings 6 and 7 as a catalyst for your healing, as well–that you might believe in a life worth living, one that goes beyond our current battles and outlives our adversary.

I wrote the book about a military maneuver called a siege. I had no idea that in the year 2020 we would all live in one. I wrote about the one that Satan executes in our minds to wage war on us and cause us to self-destruct. The unseen enemy of our souls has recently been made manifest in our lifetime through living illustrations broadcast daily.

As I am reading through my proof copy before it goes to publishing, I see the threads all coming together. The Bible story is real. My story is real. And now I see my “real” story is now a parable for the year 2021.

This is my first book. I have a lot to learn about writing still, and even after living through 2020, I think I could write several more chapters to add to this book, but I am going to let it be finished and send it out.

In order to end a siege, we must be brave enough to leave its parameters. In order to see victory, we must take steps towards hope. In order to set others free, we must become an army.

My battle with despair and suicide is not unique to me. Many others have wrestled in this siege. Pastors, worship leaders, ministers, friends and family have, or currently are in that fight. Sadly, this year many succumbed to the lie.

Someone asked me a question regarding my book, “Did you say everything you wanted to say?” And my response was “No, because I hope this book will be the start of a conversation.” There is more to be said, and some of you who read this need to begin to open up about your fight. Your enemy needs to be exposed.

I want you to know you are not alone. I want you to know that to fight your enemy you must have a plan, and you must work that plan over and over and over. This book relays my strategies. Believe me I have used them many times in this year that just passed. The fight got stronger, but the strategies still work. God will give you strategies too. Maybe some of what I share will resonate with you, and if you haven’t created a plan, perhaps some of what I have written will be useful to you or your loved ones.

The hope you and I are looking for requires leaving the city to find. There is life #beyondthesiege we only need the courage to #walkaway.

The writer of that song, Billy Simon, would later become a songwriting mentor to me as I would record my first album “From Here” in 2007, and that connection to him was made because of this song and the impact it had on me. That might be a blog for later, but for now I want to tell you about this song that still shapes my heart and sharpens my focus.

The song is called “A Man You Would Write About”. The lyrics talked about how all through the ages of time, God would choose men to lead His people, to hear His voice and to speak what they heard God speak. The idea was presented in the song that “if the Bible had no closing page, and still was being written to this day, I want to be a man you would write about–a thousand years from now they could read about your servant of choice, in whom you found favor, a man who heard your voice.”

I realized the song was sung by four men, written by a man, and highlighted men from scripture in its lyrics, but I also recognized that I could be included in this song as a woman. It wasn’t a gender-specific lyric, but it was a personal one, and I easily made it the anthem of my life.

Someone who found God’s favor, who heard His voice, and who became an echo of those words–that was something I could be. My gender, my age, my hometown, my family situation, my education were not obstacles or deterrents to my ability to know God and hear Him. In fact, probably all of those factors became part of the drive of my heart to know God better, to do those things that please Him, and to say the things He says.

I want to be a friend of God.

It’s not so much that I want to be remembered in books. That song certainly inspires me to want to live that way, but the desire to have God say, “She’s with me,” is one of the greatest honors of living. To be a friend of God, to be someone He trusts–wow!

I’ll write about His goodness. I’ll write about His faithfulness. I will declare His greatness with every breath I have left. In Jesus, God became the “Man I would write about.” And through His Spirit I might one day be.

Not every thought that runs through our heads belongs to us. Satan has plans to destroy every person God has created, and he works on sabotaging us from the inside out if he cannot succeed in killing us altogether. So, thoughts are seeds he plants, and waters, and re-enforces in hopes that they will take root in our souls and begin our undoing.

My battles have been against suicide and depression. They started in my younger years, and have reared their heads at varying points in my life. Fostered by difficult life circumstances as a young woman, my thought life became the hot bed for the enemy to plant many lies that it has taken me years to identify, denounce, and walk away from. And that is what my book is about.

There was a day I listened to a sermon about “The Siege of Samaria”, which is an Old Testament Story from 2 Kings 16-17, and there was something in the message that grabbed my attention and gave me courage to fight against the messages of death Satan was throwing at me.  It was the beginning of a journey and the beginning of a life-transformation that I am still walking out. This book tells Samaria’s story and mine.

Every year I am asked to teach on this topic, and so I thought putting it into a small book could be a way to keep the conversations going and offer help and hope for others who stand where I have stood.

The title of my book is:  Beyond the Siege Walking Away from the Enemy. It should be releasing mid-October. I pray that if you struggle with depression and/or suicide, or know someone who does, that this book will be a catalyst for deliverance and healing.

I look forward to sharing it with you soon! Stay tuned, and I will keep you posted!

It seemed that Jesus was at the mercy of evil without the ability to stop it. Grave clothes seemed to be the triumph of death and they wrapped him as they had wrapped Lazarus. They wrapped Him as every other man or woman or child who died to be placed in a tomb for the final goodbye.

The tomb was sealed with a stone too large for a man to move alone, then guarded heavily by the Roman sentry. Now off-limits and out of sight—Jesus…

Saturday passed in disbelief, confusion, fear and grief for his disciples. It was too silent. The death was too final. Their future was too uncertain. Nothing was the same, they were forever ruined. They couldn’t bring Him back—Jesus…

This would have been the golden opportunity for a man who just carried the weight of the world through a gruesome crucifixion to exit the world that killed him. He didn’t need to even consider looking back. He could have ended His relationships, re-considered His promises, disappeared to never return. But Jesus didn’t take the opportunity of the grave to exit our lives and leave us to our sin. He didn’t stay dead. He never intended to.

The death of Jesus sent an immediate tremor through hell for the victory Satan thought he had secured became a nightmare of epic proportions as the Son of God, no longer bound by flesh and blood entered hell. He wasn’t invited, but He needed no permission. Preaching liberty to the captives, and taking the keys of death, hell and the grave, Jesus dethroned the Prince of Darkness, stripping him of all power and authority, and rendered Satan’s armies defenseless. Taking captivity captive, Jesus triumphed over the power of hell leaving it a limp, lifeless, shell.

Then the Spirit who descended on Jesus like a dove at the River Jordan descended again into the tomb. Into the tightly wrapped lifeless corpse of the Son of God blew the breath of the Holy Spirit. Every cell in Jesus’ body responded and transformed. What was dead became living. What was broken became whole. What was finite took on the body of the Infinite, and what was rendered powerless through lifelessness burst from the grave with a resonance that rippled across time and reached into the future to raise lives from the grave who hadn’t even yet begun to live. Jesus was alive!

His raising from the dead meant that everything He promised He would fulfill.  His raising from the dead meant all power belonged to Him and Him alone. His raising from the dead meant hope could not be killed, and miracles were meant to be our new normal. His raising from the dead was another installment on the promise He made to us—”because I live, you also will live.” (John 14:19)

Why don’t we the audience sing “The Star Spangled Banner” together anymore at sporting events? Why is it relegated to a Soloist? Granted, some soloists can sing any song so well you think you were transported to another heavenly dimension when they are done, and I love to hear good singing, believe me; but there is something missing–something big and uniting missing when the voices of many are silenced for the one.

I thought about the most moving moments in the movie “The Sound of Music”  when Captain Von Trapp leads the Austrian audience in the singing of their anthem “Edelweiss”. Their collective voices joined together in a common affection for the country they held dear, and it was beautiful.

It’s not just the National Anthem that has been turned over to soloists. I’ve visited many churches in my lifetime and have watched a trend in worship music move from the collective voices of the many to the soloing voice on stage.  Congregations aren’t singing like they used to. I know there are multiple factors: new songs, no written music to follow, multiple lyrics, keys that aren’t congregation friendly, syncopations  that are tricky, vocal runs, octave jumps, and an inability to try to master the melody before its three minute run is over. All of these things can contribute to a worship experience that is only entered into by the ones on stage who rehearsed for hours before presenting.

I’ve attended conferences where the worship band for that night is recording their new album live, and I am part of the live experience in the audience, and that is fun except when I don’t know any of the songs, and an hour passes with me being a spectator instead of a worshiper. Like a kid waiting to enter a double-dutch jump-roping session, I’m looking for an opening, but can’t get in. So I just close my eyes and sing my own song to God in my heart.

One of my children told me the other day that they struggled to learn a new song in church, and just gave up singing. I said, “Imagine what the older generation is going through. Worship leaders don’t sing their songs anymore in church.”

“I never thought about that!” they said.

How can we create connection,  shared fellowship and story by soloing? Don’t misunderstand, I have been a soloist and singer most all of my life. I love to sing, and I love to hear singers. We need soloists.  It’s just that there are some pieces of community where the collective voice has gone silent, and almost extinct, and that bothers me. I’m glad my kids here professionals and soloists sing the National Anthem, but they also need to hear the voices of their neighbors, and the American Veterans singing that song together even if their voices aren’t as polished. My kids need to see and hear their grandparent’s generation singing “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” and watch them get caught up in the goodness of a God that has carried them through the years, as badly as they need to hear their favorite worship band sing their newest release. Both are valuable. Together they tell the story of God’s goodness. Together they give depth and meaning to the lyric and rhyme.

Wiser people have written on this subject, and I can’t begin to articulate the nuances of our culture shifts like others can. My friend Manuel Luz, a worship pastor has written several articles like this one, and I would recommend reading his thoughts on the aging out of worshipers, and other cultural hurdles in our churches on his site: www. manuelluz.com .

Honestly, I don’t have all of the solutions, and I certainly have no desire to pick on churches or sporting events. Our culture is shifting in front of our eyes, and there is a lot to keep up with, but I do want to get a conversation going. So, I would love to hear your thoughts on these things. Do you notice the silence of the collected voice? Does it bother you? How has your church or organization dealt with these issues?