Thoughts on Darkness (and prayer again)

Darkness.

What is it about darkness? Why does it scare me? Darkness is lack of security. It's confusion; vulnerability. When I'm in the dark I'm helpless and alone. I don't know what's going on. As a child I was afraid of the dark. I was afraid to go to bed every night because when the light went out and the door closed I was completely at the mercy of my fears and imagination. As a child I didn't have the advantage of knowing how the world works. I didn't know what could or could not happen. Anything that could be imagined - even anything that could not - might happen at any time. Darkness removes the comfort of familiarity. I know the laws of the world I live in, but when that world fades into night my faith in those laws ebbs away. As long as I can see desks and chairs firmly held to the ground by the faithful pull of gravity, I can trust that these laws will hold out from my reality the monsters that lurk in my imagination. The eye is the trump card. Dark dreams and musings are always playing at the back of my mind, churning out new horrors to overpower my reason, but as long as the great infallible eye denies them, they cannot take control. The problem comes when the eyes are laid to rest or muzzled in darkness. When I can see I am self-secure. I need no outside protection. I need no teddy bear or guardian angel. When darkness comes my defenses are overwhelmed, and I need to put my security in the hands of someone or something else. Generally there are two options: I can have faith in the continuing functioning of the laws of nature, or I can have faith in God. If I can trust neither, I will descend into fear and insanity.
The strange thing about being a Christian is that it means believing in monsters. We call them demons, but they're hardly different from the phantoms of my childhood nightmares. They're an unknown. I've never seen a demon; I don't know it's size, shape, speed, strength, color or texture. What I know about demons is the following:

1. They are real.
2. They are pure evil.
3. They have some form of influence on me.
4. They are related to - or perhaps the source of - all my fear.

This is what I can come up with off the top of my head. Altogether it's kind of scary; it makes me think of some Hollywood horror film. If you believe these things about demons, it's living in horror movie - or at least a suspense movie - because there are evil beings around me who I can't see and don't understand and hate me and want to destroy me. I don't know if I believe in demons in the Frank Peretti way - big reptilian beings who have swordfights with robe-and-wing angels. But I believe points 1 through 4 above, and that's enough to be scary. Especially in the dark.
When I think of being afraid of demons I think of a video I saw of a sermon in which some preacher guy talked about being "barbarian Christians". I don't remember the guy's name, only that he spoke well without notes and had green skin because the color on the TV was off. He said that one night at bedtime his son was afraid of demons and asked his Dad to pray that he'd be safe. He told his kid he wasn't going to pray for him to be safe, he'd pray for him to be dangerous. That was the guy's whole point: Christians shouldn't be safe and happy, we should be powerful. We should be scaring the demons.
This makes me think about "spiritual warfare". I always think it's a funny idea. There are preachers who'll tell you that God's on our side and we can do anything and prayer moves mountains and so on. And I think they're right. The problem is we have no idea what's going on. It's like having at your disposal some state of the art fighter jet with a bunch of nuclear missiles or whatever, only you don't have a clue how to fly. You can have the most fearsome weapons of war the world has ever seen, but if you don't know how to use them, all you can do is throw rocks. I guess I get frustrated because I'm supposed to be all excited about the power of prayer and all this spiritual stuff even though I don't see or understand any of it. Don't get me wrong, I want to be a "prayer warrior", like Jim Cymbala talks about. I want to be a prayer meeting stalwart and get up at 5:00 to pray and pray without ceasing like Brother Lawrence. But I don't understand it, and I'm so easily discouraged. I believe God's given us this phenomenal privilege and wonderful tool in prayer, but in practice it generally feels incredibly useless and boring. I'm trying to think of an illustration, but I can't. It seems to be a unique absurdity.
I see I'm talking about prayer again. I can't seem to stay on one topic for a whole entry. I guess all my frustrations are co-dependent. Which makes me hope that someday something will happen and my secret core problem will be solved and I can live happily ever after and say things like "Praise the Lord" and "God bless you, son", and wear a tie and a smile every day and drive a car with a fish on the bumper and have bible verse calligraphy in frames on my walls. I'm being half-sarcastic here, but it's a real hope of mine. I really don't want to spend the rest of my life picking bones with God.

I have to switch topics once more. I finally saw The Passion today for the first time. It was quite powerful. I came away thinking of a verse: Luke 9:23.

Then he said to them all: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me."