Down each road of any day we live,
There is an opportunity to claim your role.
It’s often easy to be a victim of each challenge,
Or, as others’ examples so well, find your victor stage.
A victor can find joy through the slightest of wins.
Rejoicing over a pound lost, a friendship regained,
Or even the idea you awoke above ground and not below.
But a victim seldom experiences a win… Unless.
Victims who are being constantly beaten down
Need something to point out their wins.
The flood of little wins can change the outlook.
Victims can easily become winners.
If you notice, these two words look the same
Only the last two letters are different.
The thought would be, and possibly incorrectly,
That they must come from the same root word.
The research is not clear.
Victor comes, it seems, from the idea of winning and conquering in battle.
Victim comes from a Latin root that indicates someone offered as a sacrifice.
Their Latin sources are different, and the idea of a sacrifice? No way! Right?
Maybe we should drop this “victim” attitude.
Especially from its source of meaning.
Why? I can still be a victor and victim at the same time
It depends on my source of meaning.
In the struggle to always look more positively at the world around me
I refuse to be offered as such, but I would take a Pauline approach.
That’s when I choose to be a victim, in the Latin sense, of course.
Following are the scriptures of reference. Maybe you recognize them?
I affirm, by the boasting in you which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily.
(1 Corinthians 15:31 NKJV)
As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
(Romans 8:36-37 ESV)
But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed— always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So then death is working in us, but life in you.
(2 Corinthians 4:7-12 NKJV)
Are they ministers of Christ?—I speak as a fool—I am more: in labors more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequently, in deaths often.
(2 Corinthians 11:23 NKJV)
Thank you for reading.
Please share with others.
It helps me get my book written!