Early Morning E-mail & My Response

Early morning E-mail

(From a friend’s e-mail) 

“When will I hate where I am more than the

possibility of failure.  The possibility?  More like,

the inevitability.  It’s not like this is the first

time I’ve failed God.  It is, however, the first time

my regret (my sin?) has overwhelmed and haunted me

like this.  And this, is a gift.”

“Now we cannot discover our failure to keep God’s law except by trying our very hardest…and ten failing.  Unless we try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being completely good.  Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder.  But in another sense it is not the trying that is ever going to bring us home.  All the trying leads to the moment at which you turn to God and say, ‘You must do this.  I can’t.’  Do not, I implore you, start asking yourself, ‘have I reached that moment?’  Do not sit down and start watching your own mind to see if it is coming along.  This puts a man on quite the wrong track.  When the most important things in our life happen we quite often don’t know, at the moment, what is going on … for a man who starts anxiously watching to see whether he is going to is very likely to remain wide awake.”

                                      Clive Staples Lewis

Early morning breakthroughs are always something to be celebrated.  However, I think that labeling it a breakthrough is sometimes dangerous.  “Figuring out” life is much like living up to God’s expectations in my eyes… it’s a moment that one thinks one can measure and compare to for future reference.  And sometimes I feel foolish because the moments that I thought I had arrived at the “finish line” concerning God, love, maturity, or life in general wer

e not finishing lines at all but rather a bend in the road that appeared to be an ending because of the angle I was coming from.  The exception to this might be the “breakthrough” in which one realizes that all breakthroughs are null and void, including the experience one might be living through at the time.  At this point one realizes he might have actually grown because he knows he might have not have grown at all up to that point and trying to measure in the past or in the present situation is the best road block to true progress.  The answer to all the questions about God, love, maturity, or life in general becomes “yes,” “no,” and “sometimes,” simultaneously.