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

Infinite Relief

We must not think Pride is something God forbids because He is offended at it, or that Humility is something He demands as due to His own dignity — as if God Himself was proud. He is not in the least worried about His dignity. The point is, He wants you to know Him; wants to give you Himself. And He and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble — delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life.

- C. S. Lewis

A Complicated Attempt to Avoid the Obvious?

If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong? ...for many years I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling "whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn't it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren't all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?" But then that threw me back into another difficulty.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet.

Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too — for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies.

Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist — in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless — I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality — namely my idea of justice — was full of sense.

Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...

- C. S. Lewis

Wickedness Examined

...wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way.

- C. S. Lewis

What is Sin?

...every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us - an energy which, if not thus distorted, would have blossomed into one of those holy acts whereof "God did it" and "I did it" are both true descriptions.

- C. S. Lewis

Fear of God: A Preliminary, Natural, Necessary Phase

Naturally the first emotion of man towards the being he calls God, but of whom he knows so little, is fear ...

Until love, which is the truth towards God, is able to cast out fear, it is well that fear should hold; it is a bond, however poor, between that which is and that which creates - a bond that must be broken, but a bond that can be broken only by the tightening of an infinitely closer bond. Verily, God must be terrible to those that are far from him; for they fear He will do, yea, He is doing with them what they do not, cannot desire, and can ill endure. Such as many men are, such as all without God would become, they must prefer a devil, because of his supreme selfishness, to a God who will die for His creatures, and insists upon giving Himself to them, insists upon their being unselfish and blessed like Himself. That which is the power and worth of life they must be, or die; and the vague consciousness of this makes them afraid. They love their poor existence as it is; God loves it as it must be - and they fear Him.

- George MacDonald

Christianity: A Derivative of Morality

Men say 'How are we to act, what are we to teach our children, now that we are no longer Christians?'...I would answer...You are deceived in thinking that the morality of your father was based on Christianity. On the contrary, Christianity presupposed it.

- C. S. Lewis

Metallic Norm

Sometimes it is the sound of iron sharpening iron, and no other, that wakes us from our slumber.