Not all that sure? C S Lewis

Just as the Christian has his moments when the clamor of this visible and audible world is so persistent and the whisper of the spiritual world so faint that faith and reason can hardly stick to their guns, so well as I remember, the atheist too has his moments of shuddering misgiving, of an all but irresistible suspicion that old tales may after all be true, that something or someone from outside may at any moment break into his neat, explicable, mechanical universe.

Believe in God and you will have to face hours when it seems obvious that this material world is the only reality; disbelieve in Him and you must face hours when this material world seems to shout at you that it is not all.

No conviction, religious or irreligious, will, of itself, end once and for all this conflict in the soul.

Only the practice of Faith resulting in the habit of Faith will gradually do that.

          --From 'Religion: Reality or Substitute?'
                  in Christian Reflections, by C S Lewis

The Path We Are On Now - Looking Back

Lord, I feel myself getting tired and growing discouraged.

I am weary of  trying to work things out. I am tired of toilet paper jokes. I am tired of wearing a mask. I am tired of distance markers in my usual stores.  I am tired of wondering if I can approach and greet my friends.

I miss church.

But I remember You never grow weary or impatient.
You never give up.

Your love is never-ending  and without limit.

It always covers me, no matter where I am or what I am doing or what I am feeling. And it fills me with joy.

I praise You because I can count on that and I know that this path we are on has a purpose.

It is taking us somewhere. Somewhere You want us to be.
And this path is exactly where You want us to be right now.

And so I am content.  Just work Your will in us.

Our Father, You and pleasing You are all that matter to us!!!

Charles Spurgeon - The Winter in My Soul - Even in June

You have made summer and winter.

Psalm 74:17

My soul, begin this wintry month with God.

The cold snows and the piercing winds all remind you that He keeps His covenant with day and night and serve to assure you that He will also keep that glorious covenant that He has made with you in the person of Christ Jesus.

He who is true to His Word  in the revolutions of the seasons of this poor sin-polluted world will not prove unfaithful in His dealings with His own well-beloved Son.

Winter in the soul is be no means a comfortable season, and if it is upon you just now, it will be very painful to you: but there is this comfort, namely, that the Lord makes it.

He sends the sharp blast of adversity to nip the buds of expectation. He scatters the frozen dew like ashes over the once fresh green meadows of our joy.

He dispenses His icy morsels, freezing the streams of our delight.

He does it all; He is the great Winter King and rules in the realms of frost, and therefore you cannot murmur.

Losses, crosses, heaviness, sickness, poverty, and a thousand other ills are of the Lord's sending and come to us with wise design.

Frosts kill harmful insects and restrain raging diseases; they break up the clods and sweeten the soul.

O that such results would always follow our winters of affliction!

How we prize the fire just now!  How pleasant is its cheerful glow!

Let us in the same manner prize our Lord, who is the constant source of warmth and comfort in every time of trouble.

Let us draw near to Him, and in Him find joy and peace in believing.

Let us wrap ourselves in the warm garments of His promises, and keep working, unlike the lazy man who refuses to plow because it is too cold; in the summer he will have nothing and will be forced to beg for breed.


---- From Morning and Evening, by Charles Spurgeon

We Reap What We Sow

Meantime I seek no sympathies, nor need;
The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree
I planted -- they have torn me, -- and I bleed.
I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.

-- From Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, by Lord Byron


And from the New Testament....

Don't be misled: No one makes a fool of God. What a person
plants, he will harvest. The person who plants selfishness, ignoring the needs of others --ignoring God! -- harvests a  crop of weeds. All he'll have a show for his life is weeds! But the one who plants in response to God, letting God's Spirit do the growth work in him, harvests a crop of real, eternal life.
Galatians 6:7 (MSG)

Whose Work is More Spiritual? C S Lewis

                                           

                                                Whose Work Is More Spiritual?

Is your work more spiritual than mine? Is a musician's performance more pleasing to God than a ditch digger's labor?

Thoughts from C S Lewis:

"I reject at once an idea which lingers in the mind of some modern people that cultural activities are in their own right more spiritual -- as though scholars and poets were intrinsically more pleasing to God than scaverners and bootblacks...this is a dangerous and anti-Christian error. Let us clear it forever from our minds.

The work of a Beethoven and the work of a charwoman become spiritual in precisely the same condition: that of being offered to God, as being done humbly 'as to the Lord.'

This does not mean, of course, that it is a mere toss-up whether he should sweep floors or compose symphonies.

A mole must dig to the honor of God and a cock must crow. We are members of one body, but differentiated members, each with his own vocation."

     "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men...It is the Lord Christ you are serving."   (Colossians 3:23)