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Every day, we follow the news of attacks and the partial defeat of terror and those who instil it, while at the same time seeing the results of that terror on victims, their families and loved ones.

The nations have decided; the superpowers and heads of nations have gathered; the armies have prepared, and the world is standing hand-in-hand against terror, evil and evil doers. While we are all concentrating so heavily on the apparent enemy, we are being attacked by another more sinister, more deadly enemy.

We all feel that the terrorists are those by whom our lives are now threatened, and that it is they who represent danger; the real danger however does not come from the enemies of this life, but rather, from the enemy of the next.

While we are distracted by the acts of terrorism which recently shook the world, we are blinded to the acts of terrorism which affect and threaten our lives every moment of every day, and which are, in many cases, more harmful. In our lives and in our thoughts we are terrorised on a daily basis, merely because we try to live according to the word of God. We are terrorised by an enemy who hates peace, who hates love and who himself is threatened by the strong presence of God in this world.

The evil master-mind whom we should seek and defeat is not hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan or in any other dark place. This master of destruction is present in every deed that is performed and lacks the Christian Love taught by our Good Saviour, and that takes us further away from the glorious kingdom which our loving Father has prepared for us since the beginning.

Satan holds us to ransom through the power which he has over us, and through our corrupted nature that is so ready to accept the wide path of evil as opposed to the narrow gate of salvation. He has hijacked the vehicle of freedom which was given to us by Our Lord and allows us to rise above and soar over the material levels of this world and has used this freedom to destroy the towers of faith and love that are the very foundation of our Christian lives.

When destruction comes into our lives through the work of this evil maestro of wickedness and sin, we must not give up but show resilience, strength and dedication in digging through the rubble and finding the signs of life which truly exist through the presence of God in our lives. Our Lord is our Saviour. Our Lord is our Protector. Our Lord is He who picks us up out of the darkness and the shadows of death and raises us to the glory that is His nature within us.

Throughout our lives we will have tribulation and possibly even near complete destruction, but our source of life is not subject to this world, our source of life is not subject to the evil villain who controls our lives; He is the source of everlasting life, He is the source of the peace which this world cannot take away from us, He is the source which springs up through each and every one of us and gives us eternal life.

If our Lord is with us, who then can be against us? If our Lord gives us life, who can take it away? We are strong in Him and through Him; we are victorious in His strength; we are alive in His blood which He shed upon the holy wood of the cross for us; we are victorious through His resurrection and through His defeat of the source of evil itself, and that is Satan and death.

When we fall, when we are surrounded by rubble and the signs of destruction we have two options; we can revel in self pity and become convinced that we are, as he would want us to believe, without hope; or we can look around us, see the destruction, see that it is not our place, that the living should not be amongst the dead, that light should not dwell amongst the darkness and that life cannot exist where there is destruction. We need to arise we need to salvage we need to rebuild so that through our feelings and actions of repentance, through the confession of our sins, through the holy sacraments and the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ which He has left for us, we may arise, rebuild and stand once more as a soaring monument of the presence of God in this world and His victory over sin, over destruction, over death and over Satan and all that which he represents.