The War is Inside

When I was younger, I thought the war was outside of myself.  After all as Donald Miller so aptly explains, we feel like we are the star of our own movie because we are in every scene.  So as the star that my movie revolved around, I thought all the drama and resistance in my life happened via the other characters in the story.

When we live in a framework where we believe our lives are determined by outside forces such as opportunities that come or don't come, whether people accept or reject us, talents we have or not, then we spend all of our time trying to control things outside of ourselves to get better outcomes.

That has a zero percent success rate.

What I've learned as I've grown older is that the only thing I have control over is myself, and that it is enough to thrive.

Lou Holtz famously said that life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you respond to it. We have control over how we react, which in turn determines our experience.  

We've seen this. We all know people who are enjoying their lives despite tremendous adversity and others who define themselves by it.

So how do we do it?

We do the internal work to show up every day for our next assignment. We don't have to get through the next five years, we only have to get through the next day.  This may seem elementary, but in truth we can opt out through any number of distractions or substances. The war inside is to truly show up for what God is unfolding all around us and to take action on the things that are offered to us to do.

We waste a lot of energy trying to rewrite the script rather than focusing on character development. And character development is all about our daily choices.