Engaging the Will to Fight

“Fight the good fight of the faith.”

—1 Timothy 6:12a (NRSV)

Particularly when depression and anxiety strike, the evolvement of many random or sudden dark imaginings, we are given to submission—the damaging kind. We submit out of ignorance, weakness, or for the situational lack of resilience. Generally afterwards we can see how we went wrong.

We don’t often think of engaging the will to fight; not the will to endure so much, but the will to fight. The weapon of fighting the good fight of the faith is hope.

If we can find our way to hope—whatever that passage is; however we can claim it—our fight has been a conquest. We have restored our spiritual equilibrium.

Engaging the will to fight occurs in the mind—to become aware, to make room, to expand our consciousness.

And if we find ourselves on a blue day, without such hope, and we don’t feel we have the strength, that is okay. But there are days when we can push ourselves; other days when we can take a risk.

Taking up the Task of Finding Hope

Finding hope is a key in fighting the good fight of the faith.

Within the darkness there is a void of hope. We find ourselves doing things we don’t accept. Things get on top of us. We lose our bearings for goodness. We feel overwhelmed and patently sad. And though these occasions may be fleeting they mark us as being without sense for hope.

Having lost our hope we survive to a certain degree, and for a time undetected. Then the lack becomes more pronounced. We notice we are struggling and others may notice too.

We have a very practical task in front of us; to find that hope that preachers and pop psychologists spruik about. We may have had a sharp connection with it. But our sense for it has diminished, perhaps even evaporated.

Finding our hope needs, therefore, to become our highest priority.

As we venture on the road toward this hope we hear about but hardly experience, our task is one of research and discovery. We begin with a blank page and fill it in as we go. Of course, we know that hope ends in God; it begins there too.

***

When life is dark hope is gone. Engaging the will to fight the good fight of the faith is the way we restore our hope. And hope finds its end in God; it begins there too.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.