Demon Speak

The scary truth is that, like the demonaic in Mark 5, our demons are speaking for us, probably more often than we realize. I know this is true in my life.

And more often than not, my demons are speaking louder than my words.

See, I often find myself saying things like, "I love you." But the truth is that I am not actively loving you. I'm not doing anything to actually love you. It's this feeling I have, this orientation I have toward loving you, and I know it in the depths of my heart, but all of the other words I actually use with you leave much love to the imagination. All of the other words I speak contradict the words I've chosen to speak. The actions I engage in around you, or even in regard to you, do not speak my love; they speak something less. So I say that I love you, but when you ask, "Do you really love me?" my demons answer, and the answer is a resounding "no."

Even though I do, really, love you. 

The same is shatteringly true, by the way, when I say such things as, "I love God." I say I love God because when I think about it, of course I do. If you asked me if I love God, the answer is that of course I do. I can think of nothing else I would do with Him but love Him. And yet, if you listen to the testimony of my life, it might be hard for you to figure that out yourself. It might be hard for you to know that I love God at all, let alone how much I love Him, by the way that my life speaks. 

These are the kinds of things that trouble my heart the most; these are the hypocrisies I can't stop thinking about. Because I do love you, and I do love God, and a thousand other things that I've thought about, prayed about, and declared with my own tongue are true. 

But then my demons speak.

I think that's one of the very real differences between our world and the world of Mark 5. In Mark 5, the demon speaks in words. In our world, I don't think it has to. I think we use so many words ourselves that our demons don't need to speak with the tongue. In fact, I don't think they could get a word in edgewise. I think we spend so much time crafting what it is that we want to say, figuring out what words we want to use, deciding who we want to hear them...that our demons realize the foolishness of the tongue and no longer speak in words.

But they speak in hypocrisy. They speak in actions. They speak in lives that don't line up with words, in movements that betray our insecurities. They speak in lives that live in unbelief, lives that are more calculated in their presentation than in their presence. They speak in lives that say things like "love" and "trust" and "hope" but don't truly know the meaning of any of these words. Lives that can't truly know the meaning of these words because these lives we live are not really filled with love and trust and hope. 

They're filled with demons.

And my demons, I don't know about yours, are too often speaking louder than my words.