Month: August 2009


  • “Hope for the Hobbled”
    part 2

    Lewis concludes this way:

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    “There is either a warning or an encouragement here for every one of us.

    If
    you are a nice person–if virtue comes easily to you–beware!
    Much is expected
    from those to whom much is given.
    If you mistake for your own merits what are
    really God’s gifts to you through nature,
    and if you are contented with simply
    being nice, you are still a rebel:
    and all those gifts will only make your fall
    more terrible,
    your corruption more complicated, your bad example more
    disastrous.
    The Devil was an archangel once;
    his natural gifts were as far
    above yours as yours are above those of a chimpanzee.

    But if you are a poor creature–

    poisoned by a wretched upbringing in some
    house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels–
    saddled, by no choice
    of your own, with some loathsome sexual perversion–
    nagged day in and day out
    by an inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best friends–

    do not
    despair. He knows all about it.

    You are one of the poor whom He blessed.

    He
    knows what a wretched machine you are trying to drive.

    Keep on.

    Do what you
    can.

    One day (perhaps in another world, but perhaps far sooner than that)
    He
    will fling it on the scrap-heap and give you a new one.
    And then you may astonish
    us all–not least yourself: for you have learned your driving in a hard school.

    (Some of the last will be first and some of the first will be last). “

    (C.S.
    Lewis, Mere Christianity pp214-215).

    As you may have guessed, there are definitely days when
    my “machine” feels like the truck in the photo,
    and I wonder if it will EVER roll properly.

    What great HOPE we may have in the

    God who understands; God Who through Jesus has himself
    driven one of these frail vehicles,

    and Who, in Love, knows intimately what we endure.

    …to abuse an old phrase,

    “Keep on trucking, friends!”

    (for an excellent summary of Hope, related to God, follow the link above)

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  •           

    Came across a passage from, (who else?) CS Lewis yesterday, which I found particularly encouraging, and felt it was worth sharing:

    Here’s part one
    (I’ll add part two as an edit tomorrow):

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    C.S.Lewis .. Nice People or New Men?

    “If you have sound nerves and intelligence and health and popularity and a
    good upbringing,
    you are likely to be quite satisfied with your character as it
    is. ‘Why drag God into it?’ you may ask.
    A certain level of good conduct comes
    fairly easily to you. You are not one of those wretched creatures who are
    always being tripped up
    by sex, or dipsomania, or nervousness, or bad temper.
    Everyone says you are a nice chap and (between ourselves) you agree with them.

    You are quite likely to believe that all this niceness is your own doing: and
    you may easily not feel the need for any better kind of goodness.
    Often people
    who have all these natural kinds of goodness cannot be brought to recognize
    their need for Christ at all until, one day,
    the natural goodness lets them
    down and their self-satisfaction is shattered.

    In other words, it is hard for
    those who are ‘rich’ in this sense to enter the Kingdom.

    It is very different for the nasty people–the little, low, timid, warped,
    thin-blooded, lonely people,
    or the passionate, sensual, unbalanced people.
    If
    they make any attempt at goodness at all, they learn, in double quick time,
    that they need help.
    It is Christ or nothing for them. It is taking up the
    cross and following–or else despair.

    They are the lost sheep; He came
    specially to find them.
    They are (in one very real and terrible sense) the
    ‘poor’    :

    He blessed them.
    They are the ‘awful set’ He goes about with–and of
    course the Pharisees say still, as they said from the first,
    ‘If there were
    anything in Christianity those people would not be Christians.”

    tomorrow: hope for the hobbled,
    (and an explanation of the background shot)


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