day no. 14,973: friction as a friend

One essential means to overcome friction is the will; we prevail over friction through persistent strength of mind and spirit. While striving ourselves to overcome the effects of friction, we must attempt at the same time to raise our enemy’s friction to a level that weakens their ability to fight.

While embracing the reality of friction is essential to developing a plan for fighting through it, it is not enough to merely have a plan for when, not if, friction should show up at your front door. While the man who does not realize or pretends not to know if friction is coming is ill-equipped to deal with friction when it does come, the man who has a plan still has a problem: he sits and waits and reacts to friction as it comes to him. 

But the battle plan is not simply enduring the enemy's bullets or surviving their bombs. It is to go out and shoot at them and blow up their strongholds.

2 Corinthians 10:4-5
For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. 5 We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ

We are not looking only to defend our home base, but to debilitate the safe spaces of our enemies. We do not merely want to endure their attacks, but reduce them by castrating their ability to produce more problems for us. While friction is a given, the amount of friction is our mission. We are to reduce the amount of friction on our doormats by causing more friction for our foes.

We are not simply called to put out the fires the enemy lights in our territory, but to illuminate our enemy's landscape with fires we sparked in theirs. We should not be overwhelmed by the fires being set to our priorities and responsibilities, but rather should overwhelm our enemy by setting fire to theirs. 

We should not only be dealing with our own fires, we should become someone else's fire with which they must deal. We should be flaming arrows shot into the darkness forcing the night to fight against the growing glow around them.

In other words, we should not seek an end to friction altogether. We should be seeking an increase in friction for our enemies, making it more difficult for them to accomplish their designs and less likely that their will and purpose would be imposed upon us.

We can ignore friction and wish it away... or we can embrace and employ it for our purposes.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
- Dylan Thomas