Tony Woodlief writes today that he doesn't know why his back hurts except that sometimes in his dreams he runs "really fast to stay a half-step ahead of the monsters".
I don't know if his monsters take any particular form but it seems that today there are plenty of candidates. (I had thought to list some but concluded that nameless monsters are more universal, i.e., the monsters in my dreams might not inhabit yours.)
I also found it particularly interesting to hear another adult confess to having monsters. A few years back my wife and I developed a strategy to deal with our son's monsters (I think we lightly spritzed water under the bed) and I wonder now if we were doing him a disservice. To him they were real, even as the ones that menace adults are real. Teaching him to trust in a sovereign God for something as silly as imagined monsters under the bed might not have been such a bad idea—we lead him to prayer for many other things.
A sovereign God. Probably sounds old-fashioned to some readers. And certainly God's sovereignty doesn't preclude those monsters from doing bad things to His people (but here we digress into free will, etc.).
The comfort comes in knowing that we are His people and even when bad things happen, we cannot be snatched from His hand. The monsters, even when they catch us, are not eternally consequential.
