Other Guests that Sneak in the Door with Pain

Last week I shared about an Uninvited, Unwanted House Guest. I'm discovering that Pain, if put to proper use, turns out to be a good helper on the way to the Kingdom where love rules. However, close on her heels are other visitors who sneak in the door right behind her. These are toxic guests, some of whom have appealing personalities. They are many and sundry; I'm going to talk about two of them who have been most deadly for me.

They are Fear and Discouragement. Fear has been the most outspoken of these toxic guests. Because Pain always disables a person in one way or another, Fear is prompt and boisterous about what is going to happen as a result of the disablement. Fear speaks with a confident and assertive manner. He plays on the victim's ignorance about what's happening but he can also play on having too much information about what's happening. He knows how to use both ignorance and information for his purposes. His intent is to paralyze his victim or to get the person to act from a state of panic.

One reason Fear is so effective is that his reasoning seems so logical. And because he is boisterous, he drowns out the quiet, often silent, voices of Love and Joy, Peace and Patience, Kindness and Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness and Self-control; it takes great effort and concentration to pick up on those quieter voices while Fear is yelling.

Close on the heels of Fear is Discouragement; he actually reaches into the soul of the victim and removes whatever courage was there, leaving the victim with no strength to do anything except to do what Fear dictates. Left to run his course and develop fully, Discouragement will grow into Despair, a state of mind which leaves the person without motivation to continue.

There are other subtle visitors lurking around, such as Religion (who accuses the person of not doing enough pious practices to convince God) and Self-Pity (who enjoys telling the victim that his/her situation is worse than anyone else's) and others; but for the sake of time, I'll leave it and let you, the reader, name your toxic visitors that have managed to sneak in with Pain.

Part of the way to make the most of Pain's visit is to learn to separate her from the toxic visitors that hover around her seeking to nullify the benefits of her visit. Next I will share thoughts about ways to sort out who's who of all these unwanted guests.