God's megaphone

Robert and Darcy, who are guests at the house, went to New Covenant with me Sunday and I think they'll keep coming. Rose was also there (she goes to St. Mary's too; we got to know each other because we both go to both churches, and I think she'll be helping out at the house soon).

There was a very good dramatic reading from the play Shadowlands, about the life of C.S. Lewis and his wife. And these words of his caught my ear:

I think that God doesn't necessarily want us to be happy. He wants us to be lovable. Worthy of love. Able to be loved by Him. We don't start off being all that lovable, if we're honest. What makes people hard to love? Isn't it what is commonly called selfishness? Selfish people are hard to love because so little love comes out of them.

God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in the world, and that mechanism is called suffering. To put it in another way, pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Why must it be pain? Why can't He wake us more gently with violins or laughter? Because the dream from which we must be awakened is the dream that all is well.

Now that is the most dangerous illusion of them all. Self-sufficiency is the enemy of salvation. If you are self-sufficient, you have no need of God. If you have no need of God, you do not seek Him. If you do not seek Him, you will not find Him.

God loves us, so He makes us the gift of suffering. Through suffering we release our hold on the toys of this world and know our true good lies in another world.

We're like blocks of stone, out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of His chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect. The suffering in the world is not the failure of God's love for us; it is that love in action.