blog.(again)

I am going to start this blog up again. It never officially shut down, but after a few months with out a post I am sure that some of you have stopped checking. Good on you loyal blog readers that never stopped checking. (That was a joke)...Anyways, I figured this would be a good place to share what I have been reading/pondering of late. If anyone reads, that would be pretty cool.

Tonight I took a break from studying and read out of a collection of CS Lewis quotes that Mike gave me. I came across an excellent passage from Clive Staples book, The Problem of Pain. There are some lines that stuck with after I read through it a couple times, and I figured that you(whoever you are, if anyone) might find helpful/convicting/encouraging. Lewis highlights the repeating patterns that I so often see in my own life. Patterns that reveal themselves in times of tribulation and suffering, but hide when all seems well. So often I forget about God when things are going well, and when things turn for the worst I either blame him or run to Him. God is not some sort of cosmic insurance agency that I can use when things go bad. Every good and perfect gift comes from Him. He created the heavens and the earth, and He created us to worship Him. Our souls will find true satisfaction in the enjoyment of Christ. Our souls will only find frustration and unrest when we fix our lives on ourselves. Thankfully, God is so faithful to continually take my eyes from my feet and point them to the cross. Anyways, read the quote, Lewis says it best:

One Mans Tale of Tribulation

My own experience is something like this. Iam progressing along the path of 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 the tickles my vanity today, a holiday or 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 hapinesses look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into that frame of mind that I intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ. And perhaps, by God's grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: Iam even anxious, God forgive me, to bonish 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 for but forty eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over--I shake myself dry as fast as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearby flower bed. And that is why tribulations cannont cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.

--from The Problem of Pain
CS Lewis

later.