C.S. Lewis//In Love

Creator > created

It is Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada. This past week has been building up to coming home and just taking some time to be thankful. Yet, this past week a theme that seemed to keep popping up in my life was the wickedness of human kind. Not a very fitting topic for the season.

This year at school I am leading a Discipleship Group and we are making our way through the book of Romans. For those of you who don’t know the book of Romans very well, it is a very “meaty” book of the Bible and it touches on a lot, and I mean A LOT, of topics that make you feel a little uncomfortable. So this week the passage we were looking at was Romans 1:18-32 God’s Wrath Against Sinful Humanity. As the title of the chapter suggests it’s a pretty harsh bit of scripture, but the verse that stood out to me most in this chapter was verse 21: “ For although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened”.

This verse points out that our wickedness and sinfulness is rooted in one key mistake we make. We ignore God. We turn our eyes to other things. Verse 23 of the same chapter says that we have traded in the glory of the immortal God for images. We have stopped worshipping the Creator and started worshiping the created.

My roommate and I watched the movie Blood Diamond this week and it showed what the effects of this verse are in real life. The people in that film were so obsessed with diamonds that they were willing to steal, cheat, lie, oppress, and even kill to get this diamond. All that for what is essentially a rock. Unfortunately this film was based on true events that happen frequently in Africa and other places around the globe. And when we look at the wars in the world, most, if not all, are caused by us wanting something: gold, oil, precious stones, power. All these things are rooted in us worshipping the created rather than the Creator.

“…although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him…” This weekend I want to take time to give thanks to God. Not only for the things He has blessed me with in my life, but for who He is. I want to thank God for no other reason than for being God. Because that in and of itself is something that I am thankful for with my whole heart. 

October*

The mornings are crisp and cool. The leaves ignite into bright shades of red and orange before falling gently to the ground. Students find their fall sweaters and scarves. The shops are once again home to a million different pumpkin flavoured treats. And as the papers and assignments start to pile up, I cannot help but put on some James Taylor, snuggle up with a good book, and sip my chai latte. Welcome October; I have missed you, my friend. 

My God

O God, You are my God,
earnestly I seek You;
my soul thirsts for You,
my body longs for You,
in a dry and weary land
where there is no water.

I have seen You in the sanctuary
and beheld Your power and your glory.
Because Your love is better than life,
my lips will glorify You.
I will praise You as long as I live,
and in your name I will lift up my hands.
My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods;
with singing lips my mouth will praise You.

On my bed I remember You;
I think of You through the watches of the night.
Because You are my help,
I sing in the shadow of Your wings.
My soul clings to You;
Your right hand upholds me.

Psalm 63:1-8

the Real World

“What is more real; picking a rose or falling in love?”

Being worldly is often considered a good thing, it means that you presumably have traveled a lot, know about various cultures and are overall quite wise. Yet the Bible warns us against becoming too worldly, about becoming too concerned with earthly things.  Yet it is easy to see why we often do become so concerned with things of this world, it’s because we can see them, touch them, they seem more real to us.

In C.S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters there is a passage about how humans become more attached to the world the longer we are here: 

            “The truth is that the Enemy [God], having oddly destined these mere animals [humans] to life in His own eternal world, has guarded them pretty effectively from the danger of feeling at home anywhere else. That is why we [demons] must often wish long life to our patients; seventy years is not a day too much for the difficult task of unravelling their souls from Heaven and building up a firm attachment to the earth. While they are young we find them always shooting off at a tangent. Even if we contrive to keep them ignorant of explicit religion, the incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry - the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon - are always blowing our whole structure away. They will not apply themselves steadily to worldly advancement, prudent connections, and the policy of safety first. So inveterate is their appetite for Heaven that our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is to make them believe that earth can be turned into Heaven at some future date by politics or eugenics or "science" or psychology, or what not. Real worldliness is a work of time - assisted, of course, by pride, for we teach them to describe the creeping death as good sense or Maturity or Experience."

What we must remember is that even though we can see and touch the things on earth, they are not the most important things. The realm of things we cannot see but can only feel or experience with our Spirits are equally, if not more, real and certainly more important.

The question at the start of this post was asked in my English class my first year at University and it really made me think. Even though picking a rose is certainly a real thing, falling in love is as well. And falling in love can change your whole outlook on the world in ways that picking a rose couldn’t.

Now I know that it can be hard to make time for God when your day is full of papers, work, laundry, grocery shopping and whatever else it is that keeps you busy, but we have to remember that those are not the really important things in life. The thing of utmost importance is our relationship with God and the time we spend with Him. There is nothing more real than that.