Joyful Transformation

I am enjoying my C.S. Lewis books on CD. I finished Mere Christianity and started The Screwtape Letters. The problem with listening to a book versus reading one is taking note of a particular saying that you want to remember. I replayed this one part this morning 5 or 6 times, but still could not get it to stick in my mind enough to leave the car and transcribe (possibly this has something to do with the heavy English accent and vernacular). So I sat in my car after arriving at the office from the gym, sweat dripping, and played this part with pen in hand. I felt that it was important for me to remember.

Screwtape is explaining that it is not necessary to keep tempting Christians with new pleasures because; “Habit renders the pleasure of vanity & excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo, (for that is what habit does to a pleasure)."

Hasn’t that happened to you? Something you found so much pleasure in not only loses a lot of its appeal, you find that you are no longer truly enjoying the experience. Yet at the same time you just can’t give it up. You cannot imagine life without the pleasure, you are sure without it you would be incomplete.

To think of this as a tool of Satan scares me and yet humbles me at the same time. I think I am in control of things. I am making choices, but what is influencing those choices? God is the only one who can create “pleasure”. Our abuse, overuse or even neglect is what makes pleasure sinful and a crutch to which we are addicted.

So the song that comes to my mind this morning is Chicago’s “Hard Habit to Break”. Maybe we should guard against making anything in life a “habit” (well except maybe the hard things we don’t like anyway like EXERCISE!!) To keep our minds and our hearts fresh and open to the things that the Spirit wants us to see, to know, and to experience we have got to get out of the ruts that habit create. We have got to be wiling to take a chance and see if we can fly. I do not think that God gave us pleasure in life and then asks us to give it all up. With our hearts and our minds turned to him, we must find the path that brings great joy where we will truly have an abundant life.