Do you have any bloodsuckers hanging around your life right now? Any people or situations that are constantly swarming you and sucking the life and vitality from you?

Bloodsuckers are an inevitable part of life, and they seem to get even more aggressive when we decide to take great risks for God.

At this year’s men’s retreat I was reminded of a helpful truth about bloodsuckers: they can only latch on to us when we stop moving.

Before the opening session of our retreat, I went for a walk in the woods to pray and I was instantly overwhelmed with how thick the swarms of mosquitoes were. They were large, loud, and aggressive, and if I stopped walking for even a second they were all over me. When I kept moving; however, they had a harder time sticking their proboscis (nice word, huh?) in to my skin. They were forced to retreat and follow me from a distance.

It’s impossible to avoid bloodsuckers—there will always be things that drain and deflate us—but if we are wise we will minimize the amount of time that we spend dealing with them. Rather, we will adopt Nehemiah’s mentality as he rebuilt the broken down walls of Jerusalem. When the bloodsuckers tried to latch on to him he said, “I am doing a great work and I cannot come down. Why should the work stop while I leave it and come down to you?” (Nehemiah 6:3)

Sometimes the best way to deal with the bloodsuckers is to get back to work God has called us to.