Excerpt from “Beyond the Siege”
INTRODUCTION
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.
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.
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.
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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
CHAPTER 3
In order to recognize where the enemy has captured our imaginations, we must understand our purpose and why we were created. For example, I can use a smartphone as a spade in my garden with a certain amount of effectiveness. But my violation of the phone’s purpose causes me and the phone to fall short of the “glory” for which it was designed. Unless I know the objective of the smartphone, I cannot know the joys of utilizing its many functions.
Similarly, unless we understand the purposes for which we have been made, we will not experience the joys intended for us, nor will we comprehend the consequences of our violations against God and one another. We must know how God sees us and what he desires for us, then join our hearts and thoughts with His.
Thankfully, we can trace our purpose back to the very beginning where God set His intentions. The Bible tells us God created humanity in His image–His very breath made us alive.1 Fashioned by God out of His heart of love, we were designed to be the praise and glory of our Creator.
Scripture tells us that the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, shared a daily fellowship with God. He walked with them, talked with them, and from His wisdom, He instructed then in all areas of life. From the garden where they lived, they were to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the whole earth.2 This was to be our heritage too. A life lived in the presence of God–enjoying the fullness of all He created for us.
But Satan had other ideas.
Lucifer a beautiful, magnificent angel whose pride and desire for worship turned him against God, was kicked out of heaven along with those who sided with him.3 Trading his heavenly glory for pride, Lucifer whose name meant “son of the morning,”4 became known as Satan, “adversary.”5 Maybe for revenge, maybe to gain more authority against God, Satan decided to make mankind the target for destruction.
In the words of Jesus: “He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”6
What could be more painful than destroying the people God created and loves? To accomplish his plan, Satan’s chief aim is to separate us from the truth so we might be candidates for destruction.
You see, there’s nothing in Scripture that suggests an omnipresent or omniscient enemy. Satan’s power in and over us must be granted to him. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that one of the most powerful weapons he uses against us is a lie. It only takes one to separate us from God. But Satan doesn’t take chances.
Over the course of a lifetime, he’ll plant lie after lie, like landmines. Satan will utilize any avenue available to plant his thoughts: family, friends, enemies, media, false religions, world events, life circumstances. His suggestions and impressions in themselves have no real power. They are lies, after all. But when we begin believing those lies, Satan gains authority. Sadly, most of us are guilty of handing over our authority at one point or another.
GENERATIONAL CONSEQUENCES
Wes Stafford recalls the story of an old man he encounters in poverty-stricken Haiti. The man was chopping down a mango tree so he could turn it into charcoal, all to make seventy-five dollars for his family. Stafford tried to reason with him: killing the tree would be a bad idea because it was the only thing living for miles; it was still producing a crop of mangoes that could be sold twice a year for seventy-five dollars each. The man dismissed the idea and continued chopping.
Feeling frantic to argue his point, Stafford grabbed the old man’s machete wielding hand and implored him:
“Don’t you see? If you kill it now…
‘No, don’t you see?!’ he suddenly shouted at me, his eyes brimming with tears, ‘I don’t know that my children or I will even be alive in five months from now! All we have is today. I barely have that!’
I stood and watched his rhythmic chopping for a while longer. Behind his hand was the hand of an enemy at work. Satan’s fingerprints were all over the tragedy I was witnessing…”
When we are in the grip of a siege, hope seems out of reach. In those frantic moments, when we feel desperate to escape our fear and pain, bad decisions will masquerade as viable solutions. What we do with those thoughts can impact hope and our lives. It can impact generations to come.
Ravi Zacharias often defined sin as “violating purpose.”8 You and I are created in the image of God. We are inherently gifted with value, meaning, and purpose. Our purpose is founded in and bounded by the holiness and unfailing goodness of God, who designed us according to His good pleasure.9
Being created by love, for love, in order to love, our lives are intended to be a continuous expression of the character of God. Anything short of God’s character–lies, murder, hate, covetousness, pride, greed, unbridled anger, lust and selfishness–violates our purpose. God calls it sin. It separates us from God and from one another.
And the Bible tells us “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”10
Most wars, feuds, racism, prejudice, unforgiveness, and bitterness of our world trace their beginnings back generations. They may even have roots that extend all the way back to the first man and woman.
Picture Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.11 The temptation to sin is before them; perhaps the thought floated through their minds, “What does it matter what we do? We’re the only ones here. It’s not like we’re going to hurt anyone?”
If anyone had the “right” to exercise such reasoning, Adam and Eve would be candidates. The problem, as we discover, is that sin doesn’t just hurt the sinner. It affects generations. In Adam and Eve’s case, the decision to. believe a lie about God’s words and his nature crippled all of humanity, in every culture and nation.
We make no decision in a vacuum, free from consequences falling on anyone else, even when we think we’re all alone. Unfortunately, our sins against God and one another always carry forward. In the story of 2 Kings, the women ate one of their sons. An heir was killed and a lineage cut off forever. The quick decision for a meal became incalculable in its generational devastation. While the decisions we make today may not have quite this dire consequences, the’ll still have consequences–they’ll still impact future generations in one way or another.
“For the wages of sin is death…”12
If we don’t cling to our convictions in the battle against despair, we’re sure to give up something precious in trade for a “fix”. Decisions made in haste, to satisfy a perceived need, result in generational consequences. When the enemy strikes a deal with us, it always causes us to lose big (like Esau, who traded his firstborn birthright to his brother in exchange for a bowl of soup.)13 In one moment of weakness, we can be coerced into giving up that and so much more.
We must take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.14 It is only when we fully examine our thoughts that we are able to discern their source. It may seem like a daunting task, but with some practice we will begin to recognize our enemy.
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1Genesis 1:27 and 2:7
2Genesis 1:28
3It’s generally believed that one third of heaven’s angels fell, based on Revelation 12″4: “And his tail swept away a third of the stars of heaven, and threw them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she gave birth, he might devour the child.”
4Roswell D. Hitchcock “Lucifer” in An Interpreting Dictionary of Scripture Proper Names (New York, 1869)
5Walter A. Elwell, “Satan” in Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, Grand Rapids, Michigan Baker Book House Company, 1997
6John 8:44b
7Wes Stafford, Too Small to Ignore, (Colorado, Waterbrook Press, 2005), 186-187
8Ravi Zacharias, Twitter post, June 2014, 9:18am, twitter.com/Ravi
9Ephesians 2:10
10Romans 3:23 KJV
11Genesis 3
12Romans 6:23KJV
13Genesis 25:29-34
142 Corinthians 10:5
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