Day Alone With God

Today, I have been taking time to get away, get quiet and seek what God has been up to and is up to in my life. One word that I would use to describe my 2009 so far, for a variety of reasons, would be "painful."

Thus, in contemplating how to spend this time today, I decided to spend some time reading C.S. Lewis' book "The Problem of Pain." Below are some of the statements that most challenged and inspired me. I hope they will you to!

“Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you will find that you have excluded life itself.” (25)

“On the one hand, if God is wiser than we, His judgment must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil.” (28)

To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labor to make us lovable.” (41)

“When souls become wicked they will certainly use this possibility to hurt one another; and this, perhaps, accounts for four-fifths of the sufferings of men. It is men, not God, who have produced racks, whips, prisons, slavery, guns, bayonets, and bombs; it is by human avarice of human stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork. But there remains, none the less, much suffering which cannot thus be traced back to ourselves.” (86)

“The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it.” (90)

“Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt.” (90)

“…pain is not only immediately recognizable evil, but evil impossible to ignore.” (90)

“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain; it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” (91)

“No doubt Pain as God’s megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepentant rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.”

“If the first and lowest operation of pain shatters the illusion that all is well, the second shatters the illusion that what we have, whether or good or band, is our own and enough for us.” (94)

As St. Augustine says, “God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full – there’s nowhere for Him to put it.” (94)

“We are perplexed to see misfortune falling upon decent, inoffensive, worthy people – on capable, hard-working mothers of families or diligent, thrifty little tradespeople, on those who have worked so hard, and so honestly, for their modest stock of happiness and now seem to be entering on the enjoyment of it with the fullest right…Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for the moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of their need; He makes that life less sweet to them.” (95)

“The full acting out of the self’s surrender to God therefore demands pain….” (98)

“…suffering is not good in itself. What is good in any painful experience is, for the sufferer, his submission to the will of God, and, for the spectators, the compassion aroused and the acts of mercy to which it leads.” (110-111)