"The spirit-to-spirit combat I endlessly wage with Satan is this ferocious thrash for joy. He sneers at all the things that seem to have gone hideously mad in this sin-drunk world, and I gasp to say God is good. The liar defiantly scrawls his graffiti across God's glory, and I heave to enjoy God...and Satan strangles, and I whiten knuckles to grasp real Truth and fix that beast to the floor.
It's just that the eyes are bad--my perspective. 'Your eye is a lamp that provides light for your body,' Jesus said. 'When your eye is good, your whole body is filled with light. But when your eye is bad, your whole body is filled with darkness. And the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is!' (Matthew 6:22-23). If Satan can keep my eyes from the Word, my eyesight is too poor to read light--to fill with light. Bad eyes fill the darkness so heavy the soul aches because empty is never truly empty; empty is only a full, deepening darkness. So this is what it is to be. Eve is the Garden, Satan's hiss tickling the ear, 'Did God actually say...?' (Genesis 3:1).
No Scripture glasses to read what God is trying to write though a prodigal child? Scrawl my own quick editing on the half-finished story: failure. Satan's tongue darts.
Not wearing a biblical lens to decipher the meaning of a doctor's ominous diagnosis? Just read Satan's slippery interpretation: cheated.
Not using anything to bend the light of this world so I can read my own messy days? Spray on another layer of graffiti: worthless.
So I have been ambushed.
Without God's Word as a lens, the world warps."
One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp
pages 90-91
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