A year ago, if you said the words spiritual warfare to me, I probably would’ve smiled politely. Nodded. Maybe offered you coffee. Then slowly backed away.
Because spiritual warfare sounded like something involving spinning heads, Latin, and a priest arriving at your house carrying a very large crucifix. I believed in God. Angels seemed lovely. Demons? I preferred they remain in movies where I could turn them off before bed.
But lately, I’ve started wondering if we got spiritual warfare completely wrong.
Maybe evil doesn’t usually announce itself by making the furniture levitate. Maybe sometimes it just waits until 2:13 in the morning. You’re lying there staring at the ceiling, replaying every mistake you’ve made since approximately 1987, and a voice starts whispering: You really screwed things up. People know. You’re never going to fix this.
Nobody’s head spins around. There’s no creepy music. Just you. The ceiling. And shame.
That’s warfare.
Or maybe it happens in your marriage. You’re standing in the kitchen arguing about the dishwasher. The dishwasher. Two grown adults who once stood before God and promised to love each other through sickness and health are now prepared to dissolve the union because someone apparently believes forks migrate naturally from the sink into the silverware drawer.
“This is not about the dishwasher!”
Correct.
It has never been about the dishwasher.
It’s about being tired. Feeling unseen. Keeping score. Wanting to be appreciated. And suddenly the person you love most has become the enemy because apparently Satan has expanded operations into kitchen appliances.
That’s warfare too.
Sometimes it looks like temptation arriving at precisely the moment you’re weakest. Funny how temptation never shows up after eight hours of sleep, a healthy breakfast, prayer, exercise, and a lovely conversation with someone you love.
No. It arrives when you’re exhausted. Lonely. Angry. Ashamed. Usually holding some snacks.
And it doesn’t say, “Hello. I’m here to destroy your life.” That would be helpful.
It says: You deserve this. Just this once. Nobody will know. Tomorrow you can start again.
Evil has excellent marketing.
And maybe the strangest part of spiritual warfare is how ordinary it looks. We expect demons. We get resentment. We expect darkness. We get distraction. We expect some enormous battle between good and evil. Instead, we get a phone in our hand at midnight and the opportunity to spend another hour comparing our actual life to somebody else’s filtered one.
You can’t see any of it. But invisible doesn’t mean imaginary.
You can’t see gravity either, but try stepping off your roof. You can’t see Wi-Fi, yet apparently it has enough power to make an entire family panic when someone says, “Is the internet down?”
We believe in plenty of invisible things because we can see what they do.
Maybe that’s how I’ve started thinking about the spiritual world.
I can’t see pride, but I’ve watched it destroy relationships. I can’t see shame, but I’ve watched it convince good people they are beyond redemption. I can’t see despair, but I know what it sounds like when it whispers: Why bother?
And I can’t see grace either.
But I’ve watched people get back up who had absolutely no business getting back up. I’ve watched forgiveness happen where resentment would’ve made more sense. I’ve watched people choose sobriety one more day. Choose their marriage one more time. Choose hope after life gave them every reasonable excuse not to. Choose God while still being angry with Him.
Maybe that’s spiritual warfare too.
Not some spectacular battle happening above the clouds. Maybe it’s happening inside ordinary people on completely ordinary Tuesdays. In kitchens. Bedrooms. Cars. Hospital rooms. Church pews. Recovery meetings. And at 2:13 in the morning when nobody else knows you’re fighting anything at all.
I used to think spiritual warfare meant believing there was something evil trying to get me. Now I think it’s something much more personal.
It’s deciding which voice gets the final word.
Shame says: You are what you did.
Grace says: Get up.
Fear says: It’s over.
Hope says: Not yet.
Darkness says: You’re alone.
And somewhere beneath all that noise, almost quietly enough to miss, God keeps saying: I’m still here.
Maybe that’s why darkness works so hard to convince us we’ve already lost. Because darkness has one rather embarrassing problem.
It cannot actually defeat light.
It can only convince us to stop looking for it.
And maybe faith isn’t believing the darkness isn’t real. Maybe faith is standing in the middle of it—scared, exhausted, tempted, ashamed—and remembering that darkness has never once been able to extinguish even the smallest light.
Not once.
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
—John 1:5
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