C.S. Lewis, yet again, gives us another wonderful gem of a thought.
Lately I’ve been overwhelmed by work. Task after task just keeps piling up on my desk. A PhD dissertation to finish, a book manuscript to edit, a seminary community to serve, courses to teach, and most of all, a family to love. There is just too much to be done in a day. It is each day that I feel quite frustrated and exasperated because, “I will never get it all done.”
C.S. Lewis reminds me that because of the reality of death there will always be something left undone. Always. This frustration, this on-going state-of-mind, is not indigenous to human experience as God intended it. God’s intention for humanity was (and is) to live forever. Prior to the Fall humanity had all the time it needed to move from one task/project to the next! This sense that there is an end coming, that there is a final deadline, the deadline that we all face, is quite foreign and indeed originates with sin.
This certainly means that Christ, then, as a New Covenant people invites us to recalibrate our thoughts and feelings towards a different reality—the reality that the only urgency is to know that “the present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received” (Lewis, Weight of Glory)—the reality to live in the moment.
Jesus had something to say about this: “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, not about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? [. . . ] and which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” (Matt 6:25 and 27)
This is a tremendous challenge. Obeying this command is not as easy as simply obeying—obeying this command means breaking a life-long habit. This is, by the way, often times the case with obeying the commands of Jesus. Nike’s “Just Do It” doesn’t always apply. Breaking mental habits that make up who we are and how we function is not an easy task. Not only that, but it’s also terrifying! It’s terrifying because we are the sum total of our habits—our habits shape how we think (both consciously and subconsciously), how we behave, how we make decisions, etc.
Obeying Jesus means conjuring all our human energy and discipline in order to break our habits that have been formed by a life oriented by death and decay of the fallen world.
What I’m talking about is none other than what Jesus is talking about when he says to his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” (Matt 16:24, emphasis added) We. Must. Die. We do so trusting that Jesus will give us life through another way, through another set of habits, through an entirely different way of thinking and behaving.
This is the life of the disciple. It requires hard, hard work. This is sanctification.
Be sanctified, take on the mind of Christ by throwing off the mental habits of anxiety and frustration.
Excerpt from Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis
The second enemy [of the scholar in wartime] is frustration—the feeling that we shall not have time to finish. If I say to you that no one has time to finish, that the longest human life leave as man, in any branch of learning, a beginner, I shall seem to you to be saying something quite academic and theoretical. You would be surprised if you know how soon one begins to feel the shortness of the tether, of how many things, even in middle life, we have to say “No time for that,” “Too late now,” and “Not for me.” But Nature herself forbids you to share that experience. A more Christian attitude, which can be attained at any age, is that of leaving futurity in God’s hands. We may as well, for God will certainly rein it whether we leave it to Him or not. Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment “as to the Lord”. It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.
