Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is in coming to believe such dreadful things about him. The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.' - C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

I began reading A Grief Observed yesterday in my receptionist downtime and I found it to be quite conversational and accurate. C.S. Lewis usually causes me to think a great deal, so of course, this book is no different. I began to think about how we form our picture of God. We have so many things that are fighting to tell us what we should believe about God. The other day, I believe I was listening to a sermon and the pastor pointed out that our earthly fathers shouldn't tell us what God is like but God should tell us what our Father should be like. As true as this may be, we all have lenses through which we view God. Lewis' had just lost his wife when he wrote A Grief Observed and he was afraid that he would come to view God as vindictive or uncaring or not trustworthy. Sometimes that is so easy because we lack the full picture. We can only see a little tiny part of our lives, which is even tinier when we think of the whole scope of the world in all of time. I think that no matter what we have to choose to believe that no matter what, God is good and trustworthy and that he loves us more than we can dream. It's a battle because sometimes God does take what we love most and we can only hang on by a seemingly small belief that God knows what he's doing. I don't really have a resolution to these thoughts of mine, so I will end simply by telling you that I want chocolate ice cream and I am sleepy.

1 comment:

Megan said...

That is so interesting. I think my biggest fear woild be concluding He doesn't exist. C.S. Lewis is so wonderful. So are you.

This reminds me of that quote about tangible things seeming 200x more real to us than God. I'm not sure why.