Reflex Spiritual Dystrophy

My son has a very rare nerve disease. It is called RSD (Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy). He has had it since a wrestling injury his seventh grade year of middle school. Long story short, it attacks the nervous system after some type of trauma and fools the brain by sending constant pain signals from an injury that has technically healed. The pain signals grow to become hundreds of times worse than the actual injury could cause. It conditions the body to feel pain in extreme amounts over the smallest of stimuli. There is no known cure. Medications do not work. He is constantly fatigued, experiences chronic pain, and the acute pain comes and goes with even the slightest of agitation. The disease sends a false message to the brain and the brain is conditioned to believe it, therefore cause the experience of REAL pain. To onlookers, he seems to be a healthy, strong, and vibrant young man, but internally…his pain is more extreme and debilitating that anyone could ever imagine.

I have been evaluating my own spiritual life and literally falling at the altar praying over the fatigue and frustration I have been dealing with from the recent, actually ongoing over the last several years, attacks of Satan. The Holy Spirit sweetly enlightened me to the tools Satan has been using in my life. I have had several “traumas” over my adult life that Satan has tried to injure and cripple me with. God has graciously given me strength to recognize these tactics and kept me safe from actually breaking, BUT….

Satan is crafty. He has secretly been poking at me for years.

He has been attacking the nervous system of my life and has poured out his own RSD on my spiritual life. (Maybe we can call it Reflex Spirituality Dystrophy.) The traumas of life I have experienced haven’t broken me, but he has taken each incident and caused it to create a spiritual dystrophy in my life. He has fooled my brain into thinking that I am in constant pain. His lies have invaded the nerve path that leads to my brain and conditioned it to believe that there is no cure. He attacks with small, constant messages. The attacks are small, but constant which has made me spiritually fatigue. He has caused even the smallest stimuli to overload my brain and my spiritual nervous system.

Although there is no cure for my son’s RSD, he has found that he has to constantly push himself. He has to condition himself to the pain. And even as frustrating and painful as it is… the more he pushes, the more he conditions himself to deal with the pain. I have found that to be true in my own spiritual life.

Recently, my son had a pretty major surgery to have a spinal cord stimulator implanted. Basically a lead is put on his spinal cord and it has an internal battery pack. The stimulator is programmed with different settings that work in different conditions and sends a signal to the brain that keeps the lines busy so the RSD signals can’t get through. He is still in early stages of recovery. We haven’t seen a huge difference in the acute pain, but the chronic pain and fatigue is slowly lessening.

I love how the Holy Spirit is so sweet to use our own life to teach us spiritual lessons!

My Reflex Spiritual Dystrophy is needing the same operation. I am going to have to let the Holy Spirit implant himself on the very lifeline to by brain. He needs to be implanted on the lifeline to my brain where Satan has been trying to poke and attack…making me believe false messages. I am going to have to stay so close to his battery “charge” that HIS messages can busy up the lines that Satan has been trying to use to wear me down over so many years.

I also have to realize that just as the RSD has conditioned my son’s brain to believe it is still injured, I have to realize that Satan has secretly been conditioning me to believe that I will never live without this pain, without the frustrating circumstances, without that cloud of “bad luck” that seems to be constantly destroying my spiritual nervous system. My relationship with the Holy Spirit has to be so deep inside me that I learn the right programs to defeat the messages of Satan. I have to be to the point that there is a constant message to my brain and heart from the Holy Spirit that Satan’s lies cannot get through. They will always be there… trying to pry through when my battery is weak or when I turn it off. My job is to learn what programs work best and to constantly keep the stimulator active.

It amazes me how God can use such things to teach us! I am going to have to retrain my brain. I must let God do the surgery that needs to be done to let the Holy Spirit embed himself deep in my flesh. I need to let Him have control of my spiritual nervous system. And, I also have to realize that such invasive surgery…whether physical or spiritual, takes time to heal.

Maybe you need to take a look at your own life today. Do you have Reflex Spiritual Dystrophy? Dystrophy is a disorder in which an organ or tissue of the body wastes away or it can be an impaired nourishment of a bodily part. Doesn’t that sound exactly like what Satan wants to happen to Christians? He wants us to waste away and the way to do it is to find ways to impair our spiritual nourishment. Has Satan conditioned your spiritual reflexes to the point you have dystrophy? He wants us to be too tired and in too much pain to experience the TRUTH of the Word, the LOVE of God, and the NURISHMENT of the Holy Spirit. Let’s undergo surgery. Let’s let the Holy Spirit take residence in our flesh today and start programming us to hear the message of healing today.