In a battle of wills between a dog and a cat, the dog will win. Because the dog is persistent and the cat will get bored.
When you fighting your battles, remember, even if your strength diminishes and you feel you can’t go on, if all you do is keep going forward you will eventually succeed. Never doubt the value of being persistent.
When we pray we can easily feel like nothing is happening and some days we want to just give up. But God. God is working on things we cannot see, yet. We will see the outcome if we don’t give up and walk away.

How did God manage to enslave us into doing His will? Answer. He didn’t. So why do we serve Him? Because we love Him. And why do we love Him? Because He loves us.
The world says that we who serve God simply don’t have the power to live on our own. That we aren’t strong enough to accept that it’s all up to us. But it has nothing to do with our inability to care for ourselves. It’s harder to serve someone else than it is to only serve Y O U. We are not slaves to God, doing His will under a lash. We are His beloved children. If a parents asks you to do something or to not do something, why do you listen? Okay. Yes. Some kids listen out of fear. But most kids who obey do it because they love their parents and want to make them happy. Why do they love their parents? Because their parents love them. They care for them and help them because their children are the most important things in the world to them. In return the children love and obey their parents because there’s a part of you that always says, I want to be worthy of this love they give. You don’t need to be worthy they don’t require you to be worthy, they simply love you, but when you love them back you want to do all you can to make them smile. We can never be worthy of God’s love. But we can love Him back and show Him that we care for Him by serving Him, obeying Him, and honoring Him.

Becoming the hero others need you to be

Heros. They come in all shapes and sizes. Many who are claimed to be heros I personally wouldn’t consider a hero, and others who are not lifted to the hero level actually deserve to be up there. Heros are circumstantial. Winston  Churchill was a hero in his time due to his efforts for the war. And yet after he wasn’t needed anymore he was thrown away and is often ridiculed by low thinking individuals. Circumstances made him a hero. When those circumstances were gone he went back to being who had started as. Some Heros are actually tagged as villains, but when you take a good look at what they have done and why, you can see their cape flutter slightly under their clothes. As one hero once said, ‘if I have to be a villain in the eyes of those who don’t understand then I will he a villain and get the job done.’
Why bring this up?
Things have been twisted in our world. Evil is seen as good and those who fight that evil are seen as the bad guys. It makes me think of my dog. One time while camping a set of off leash dogs attacked my dog and I. He was injured a bit but not badly, and only by the grace of God was he okay. I still don’t like him around off leash dogs after that and it was years ago. Later a friend of the owner of the two dogs who had attacked us came and confronted me because her dogs were bleeding and they said mine was to blame. I…. won’t go into what I said to that. But my dog was able to get away from those dogs. He fought for my sake. He became the hero that circumstance needed. And he was ridiculed for it. We were doing what we should have been doing. They came out of no where and attacked us and we got blamed. You see, the hero doesn’t always look like a hero, and the true villain can disguise himself to look like a victim.
As Christians we are often shown to be the bad guys. Even when we are helping people, even when we are risking ourselves to stop a bad thing from happening, we are still labeled as the villains. But so was Jesus. He healed people. Fed the hungry, loved the leper, raised the dead and every action was shown by his enemies to be wrong. I don’t mean just the Pharisees. The government saw Him as a threat. People would follow and mock His deciples. They were beaten and tortured for doing what God tells us to do. They rose as the Heros the world needed. Even now we look to tye deciples teachings and writings. Martin Luther burned at the stake for spreading the gospel. David Livingston was under threat from mercenaries when preaching and tending to the sick in Africa. Billy Graham had death threats and slanderous ( false) accusations. David Wilkerson had everything from death threats and physical attacks to poverty and personal health challenges. Kathrine Coolman had chronic pain from illness all her life.
The list goes on and on and on. God’s people have raised themselves up to become the heros other people needed them to be since the beginning. And they have been attacked and called every evil the simple minds of people could think of. But they kept going. They said, ‘if the world sees me as a villain because they don’t understand, then I will be a villain and get the job done.’
We aren’t weighed and measured by man. We are weighed and measured by God. And if we are pushing through rock wall because God has told us to, then we are doing the right thing no matter what people say about us. Go for God’s glory and you will succeed where it matters.