|
I am progressing along the path of my life in my ordinary contentedly fallen and godless condition, absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity today, a holiday or a new book, when suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in the newspapers that threatens us all with destruction sends this whole pack of cards tumbling down.
At first I am overwhelmed and all my little happiness look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into a frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only treasure is in Christ. And perhaps by God's grace I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing strength from the right sources.
But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys. I am ever anxious to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat, because it is now associated with the misery of those few days.
Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me but forty-eight hours, and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over. I shake myself as dry as I can and race to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed.
And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our re-making is now hopeless.
C.S. Lewis
|
