right now I am trying to do a thousand and six things: finish schoolwork, catch up on graceland (a really fantastic show on usa, by the way), find the SYTYCD finale online through a number of sketchy websites... but I can't seem to focus on any of those things. I'm thinking about something I read tonight, something that was so profound yet shockingly simple.
"Thus one Need-love, the greatest of all, either coincides with or at least makes a main ingredient in man's highest, healthiest, and most realistic spiritual condition. A very strange corollary follows. Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help? This paradox staggered me when I first ran into it; it also wrecked all my previous attempts to write about love." [C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves]
I started a new bible study tonight, and this is the book we are using. I've never actually read C.S. Lewis (I know, I know... I feel like this makes me a fraudulent Christian somehow?) but WOW he is awesome. I get it now, why everyone loves him so much. Just the intro chapter blew my mind, and got me so excited to start studying the book.
We talked a lot about how this excerpt is really applicable to our lives in difficult situations. Like when we're at rock bottom, distraught and desperate, heartbroken and exhausted. It is absolutely true that in those times, we feel we can draw exceptionally close to God because of our hopelessness. But here's what I would argue: we don't need to be going through a difficult situation in order to be "least like God."
What I mean: when I think of the times where I felt closest to God, they weren't all in hard times. In fact, some of my best moments with God have come when life was good. Because it's in those times that I realize just how small I am. I am literally like a tiny fleck of life on this massive earth, and I'm so thankful for that. It's in my happiest moments when I recognize that as good as this life is, it's only going to get better. I am so small, and helpless, yet cared for by a massive Father, and that enormous difference between me and Him provides a strange sense of comfort. It's so joyful to know that we are just pieces of a puzzle, servants living out a master plan that is something bigger, more beautiful than we could ever comprehend.
I started a new bible study tonight, and this is the book we are using. I've never actually read C.S. Lewis (I know, I know... I feel like this makes me a fraudulent Christian somehow?) but WOW he is awesome. I get it now, why everyone loves him so much. Just the intro chapter blew my mind, and got me so excited to start studying the book.
We talked a lot about how this excerpt is really applicable to our lives in difficult situations. Like when we're at rock bottom, distraught and desperate, heartbroken and exhausted. It is absolutely true that in those times, we feel we can draw exceptionally close to God because of our hopelessness. But here's what I would argue: we don't need to be going through a difficult situation in order to be "least like God."
What I mean: when I think of the times where I felt closest to God, they weren't all in hard times. In fact, some of my best moments with God have come when life was good. Because it's in those times that I realize just how small I am. I am literally like a tiny fleck of life on this massive earth, and I'm so thankful for that. It's in my happiest moments when I recognize that as good as this life is, it's only going to get better. I am so small, and helpless, yet cared for by a massive Father, and that enormous difference between me and Him provides a strange sense of comfort. It's so joyful to know that we are just pieces of a puzzle, servants living out a master plan that is something bigger, more beautiful than we could ever comprehend.