The Tension

The tension is here...

between who you are and who you could be...

between how it is and how it should be...

- Switchfoot

Guiding Light

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.

- The book of Psalms

A Perfect Circle

[God's 'goodness'] differs from [our definition of 'goodness'] but it is not sheerly different; it differs from ours not as white from black, but as a perfect circle from a child's first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning.

- C. S. Lewis

The Possibility of Evil or Good: Our Choice

If even a pebble lies where I want it to lie, it cannot, except by a coincidence, be where you want it to lie. And this is very far from being an evil: on the contrary, it furnishes occasion for all those acts of courtesy, respect, and unselfishness by which love and good humour and modesty express themselves. But it certainly leaves the way open to a great evil, that of competition and hostility. And if souls are free, they cannot be prevented from dealing with the problem by competition instead of courtesy. And once they have advanced to actual hostility, they can exploit the fixed nature of matter to hurt one another. The permanent nature of wood which enables us to use it as a beam also enables us to use it for hitting our neighbor on the head. The permanent nature of matter in general means that when human beings fight, the victory ordinarily goes to those who have superior weapons, skill, and numbers, even if their cause is unjust.

- C.S. Lewis

...Work Out Your Salvation with Fear and Trembling, for It is God Who Works in You...

...handing everything over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.

- C.S. Lewis

Keep the Faith

[Faith, in one sense] is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian, I do have moods in which the whole thing [Christianity] looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods 'where they get off', you can never be either a sound Christian or a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train in the habit of Faith.

The first step is to recognize the fact that your moods change. The next step is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious readings and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. And as a matter of fact, if you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?

- C.S. Lewis

The Basic Sin Behind All Particular Sins

[The first sin of Adam] has been described by Saint Augustine as the result of pride, of the movement whereby a creature (that is, an essentially dependent being whose principal of existence lies not in itself but in another) tries to set up on its own, to exist for itself. Such a sin requires no complex social conditions, no extended experience, no great intellectual development. From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the center [of all things] is opened to it. This sin is committed daily by young children and ignorant peasants as well as by sophisticated persons, by solitaires no less than by those who live in society: it is the fall in every individual life, the basic sin behind all particular sins. At this very moment you and I are either committing it, or about to commit it, or repenting it. We try, when we wake to lay the new day down at God's feet; before we're finished shaving it becomes our day, and God's share in it is felt as a tribute which we must pay out of 'our own' pocket, a deduction from the time which ought, we feel, to be 'our own'.

How to Avoid God

Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. If you must read books, select them very carefully. But you'd be safer to stick to the [newspaper]. You'll find the advertisements helpful; especially those with a sexy or snobbish appeal.

- C.S. Lewis

I Got Dreams

1) Driving from point A to point B with Point A being someplace where I found out my car needed repairs and fast, and point B being the place that could fix it for a hefty loot o' cash that I had no idea how I was gonna get. Then, as I'm driving on this little country road, all of a sudden, an enormous flash of bright white light explodes before my eyes. The light is so intense, I actually feel it in real life. It startled me. Then, in the dream, the car has disappeared, and there I sit, unharmed (and in an unrelated thought, unarmed) in the middle of the street. I look down, and there in my hands sits a check made out to me for 15,000 clams. Then I wake up.

2) I am in someone else's house, or some kind of public place, maybe a hotel...yeah, I think it was a hotel. Anyway, people start assaulting the place with guns. A group of 'evil-doers' start shooting up the place in a rampage. I am there. I come to the point in my dream where most people get to and know that if it were real life, they would die, but somehow they either miraculously escape death in some deus ex machina kinda way, or they wake up and are saved by the bell. Well, in my dream I get shot - in the gut. Then I get shot again, in the chest. Then, I'm thinking, OK, I'm gonna survive this somehow, but then immediately the gunman comes to me and shoots me in the head. Then I think, not really recognizing that this is a dream, well, I guess it is time to die, and I just go with it. I remember thinking "Now I get to find out what nobody really knows until it happens to them." As I'm contemplating the surreal experience that I'm going through, I begin to notice my body sliding through some cross between a mud filled slip and slide like the one in Shrek 3, and the chamber that Neo wakes up in after he takes Morpheus' pill to wake up in the 'real' world. Then, somehow, I come back to life in the dream. Unlike Neo, I wake back up in the world I left when I was shot. I marvel at the fact that I survived. Then, I wake up for real.

The Alcoholic

For the temperate man an occasional glass of wine is a treat...But to the alcoholic, whose palate and digestion have long since been destroyed, no liquor gives any pleasure except that of relief from an unbearable craving. So far as he can still discern tastes at all, he rather dislikes it; but it is better than the misery of remaining sober.

- C. S. Lewis

The Inevitable and the Avoidable

Pain is inevitable. Misery is a choice.

- David Briner

Thank God

Thank God, we are nowise bound to accept any man's explanation of God's ways and God's doings, however good the man may be, if it do not commend itself to our conscience.

- George MacDonald

The Magic Apple

I have the deepest respect for Pagan myths, still more for myths in Holy Scripture.

- C. S. Lewis

Working on the Car

The Working on the Car analogy to which Erin refers is something that I now can't remember if I read somewhere and altered, or something that just came to me. If I am indeed plagarising it, I confess myself of it at this point, and offer my apologies to the true author. For the sake of fairness, let's say that this is someone else's analogy, and I am merely echoing it:

Liken your relationship with God to the image of a father and his son. They find themselves one Saturday afternoon out in the driveway. The father's torso tucked under the hood of a car, the son standing by at the ready. The father is doing all the work. He knows what job is necessary to complete the needed repairs. The son waits in anxious anticipation for any instructions from his father on how he might assist in the process. The father is doing it all. Then, to the son's delight, the father calls for the son, and asks that he bring a particular tool. The son jumps at the opportunity to lend a hand. He identifies the tool his father requested, and delivers it with glee. His glee is pure, and stems from the chance to simply play a small role in assisting his father. The father could have gotten the tool himself, could have ignored the eager child waiting by his side, but instead, he was pleased by the child's eagerness, and wanted him to be a part of his work. Once the tool is handed from the son to the father, the father surprises the boy. He asks his son to come closer, and watch what he intends to do with the tool. The father demonstrates the use of the tool for the particular job he has in mind. He walks the son through the repair work to be done. Then, the father hands the son the tool and says, "You do it. I'm right here, and will help when you need it, but do it just like I showed you." The son trembles with excitement and fear. He wants nothing more than to please his father, and show him that he's a good son. The boy tries, but fails miserably at reproducing the manuever he had just watched his father perform. The child sulks, and feels great regret and shame for the way he believes he's just disappointed his father. But the father is far from disappointed. The father is overwhelmed with pleasure, beaming with joy because he knows how much his son wants to please him. He tells his son, "It's alright, try again, you're doing fine. You're learning. This is how I meant to teach you. Someday you will be able to do this on your own. One day, after practice and guidance, you will be an expert at this."

In one way or another, that story, or analogy, or illustration was inspiring to someone I shared it with. So, I bring it here for the millions (not) of readers of this blog to see.

I now approach the morning where I go to visit my earthly father in the hospital. He's been admitted due to suffereing through life threatening withdrawal symptoms after a day without alcohol. I go to see him in hopes of encouraging him to stay for the prescribed time to detox with medical supervision. I pray to the Father of us both that his pride will be broken, that his will will fail, and he will finally rely on others for his steps to freedom. Wish us luck.

Help Me Believe

Maybe I'd see much better by closing my eyes.

- Nichole Nordeman

Everything is Under Control?

I don’t hate God because I don’t believe God is fully in control of this world yet. Heck, God is not fully in control of me yet, even when I want Him to be, so how could I possibly believe that God is making it all happen out there in the street?

- Bart Campolo

Lifting Weights

It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow, that weigh a man down.

- George MacDonald

Friends

Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.

- C.S. Lewis

We shall not be condemned, but...

Friends, our cross may be heavy, and the via dolorosa rough; but we have claims on God, yea the right to cry to him for help. He has spent, and is spending himself to give us our birthright, which is righteousness. Though we shall not be condemned for our sins, we cannot be saved but by leaving them; though we shall not be condemned for the sins that are past, we shall be condemned if we love the darkness rather than the light, and refuse to come to him that we may have life. God is offering us the one thing we cannot live without--his own self: we must make room for him; we must cleanse our hearts that he may come in; we must do as the Master tells us, who knew all about the Father and the way to him--we must deny ourselves, and take up our cross daily, and follow him.

- George MacDonald

Getting to Know God

When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side. If He does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him. And, in fact, He shows much more of Himself to some people than to others - not because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition. Just as sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as a clean one.

...the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, His glimpse of God will be blurred - like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope.

C. S. Lewis