Skirmishing on the Periphery?

Most of us are pretty good at working out what we believe to be core areas of our life and by extension that which we feel is not to be considered as relevant. The irrelevant we turn a blind eye to, or at least permit such areas to remain on the edge. What we wish to deal with takes precedence to anything that we do not believe to be of the same importance. And yet much of the time this same periphery is the very point that the opposition chooses to make our lives uncomfortable and our service to Father of less effect. Anything that draws our attention away from the Master and His plan for us causes us to pause, to move or become distracted to the point of refocussing our self centred direction. Gods opponent knows full well that we are focussed on that which affects us directly at the detriment to the wider issues of life. Just as an experiment try kicking your toe, a minor inconvenience, and then try going for a walk in no time the biggest pain that you will feel will be that minor kicked toe. Satan knows that we feel worse about the aches and pains of human existence than we do about the things of God that we ignore. C.S. Lewis in his book Screwtape Letters that Screwtape the senior tempter would rather that his minion, Wormwood, had given his human target a negative an attitude about the Christians he was associating with. Even the church tennis club was a weapon that was available to Wormwood to use to pervert his humans thoughts about his new found life. These boundary concerns are often hidden in the events of people bumping up against other people. They amount to little more than perceptions we have about that other person, things that we do not have under our own control. It is the way that we or the other person dresses, or the way we assess a persons body compared with our own. These skirmishes are as old as the Church. There are all about positioning. the mother of the Sons of Thunder came up and asked Jesus if her sons could sit at His left and right hand when He ushered in His kingdom. They are about trying to look good, at least better, than another. Paul had to take Peter to task when Peter visited Antioch after Peter turned two faced refusing to eat with the Gentile believers after the Jewish believers sect showed up. This is a complex area for us to consider. Complex because of the wide variety of levels that it affects and as I write this I am becoming overwhelmed with the scope that the skirmishing can affect. The Master would have us deal with the things that He puts in front of us rather than being diverted by the peripheral issues that come up against us. They are there to divert us from our given path. They are unimportant in the overall scheme of things. They are a divisive scheme of the opposition meant to have us stumbling about in the dark. This is not a place that has been reserved for you by the Father. He wants you to walk in the light of love which is the opposite to where skirmishing will take us. We need to keep our focus on the Father and trust to His direction, which will be enough to keep us in the Fathers will.