How we fight is important. There’s a powerful song that I usually call Fight My Battles. Its true name is Surrounded (Fight My Battles). Each time I hear it, I have a combination of a sense of peace and a truth check of how I’m dealing with the process of peace in that moment. There are always battles going on within and around us. We sometimes see several choices: We can walk away. We can get overwhelmed. We can deal with them our way, and if we don’t get the result we want, we at least kept ourselves happy.

But sometimes walking away is (easier but) wrong. We miss the opportunity to reconcile a situation or relationship, gain understanding, and personally grow. Sometimes feeling overwhelmed is not actually being overwhelmed. The feeling of being overwhelmed can prompt us to reach out for healthy help. We can grow in our faith because of our reliance on God. And dealing with it the way we want to keep ourselves happy? That might be the most popular go-to approach of all in our culture, but that doesn’t mean it’s the healthiest. We can make a mess of things by the ways we react and dig in because we think we know best.

Every single one of us has battles—internally and externally.

We get distracted and make the battle something it isn’t. We miss the true battle because we follow the rabbit trails in the periphery. We lessen the value of the battle, often because we don’t want to deal with something, and we reassure ourselves with a quip or meme. Or we dig in and make the battle more about winning at all costs instead of realizing every single person in a battle will experience some moments they can define as successes, moments they can chalk up to defeats, and many moments of wounding.

How do you fight your battles? Whose battles are they? Who gets to define them? When you are surrounded, with and in whom do you surround yourself? It’s important to know. It’s important to practice. It’s important to worship.