Waiting for Spring

At last, a sign of Spring: a little green shoot has poked its head out in our daffodil patch.

When I was rereading C. S. Lewis earlier this week, I came across a passage about our "first fervor" for God. Many of us can remember moments when God felt very near and we were excited to be Christians. Perhaps we recall a childhood full of wonder, the passion of our conversion as adults, God's presence with us in a difficult time, a golden age in the life of our community. Lewis encourages us to treasure those memories, but not to hold onto them too tightly or wear ourselves out trying to recreate them. Like the bulbs that wait out the winter underground, our faith naturally dies back for a time. It will grow again in new and surprising ways, but we can not force it along. Don't start digging up the bulbs in your impatience, Lewis says. Wait, and the flower will come.

Good Pretending

C. S. Lewis offers very practical advice for the times when we don't really feel like praying or doing good works. In his Mere Christianity, he says to try pretending that you really do want to do what is right. "There are two kinds of pretending," he writes. "There is the bad kind, where the pretense is there instead of the real thing; as when a man pretends he is going to help you instead of really helping you. But there is also a good kind, where the pretense leads up to the real thing. When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will really be feeling friendlier than you were." This good pretending opens the door for God to turn our hearts. When you pretend that you want to be with God and sit down to pray anyway, Christ "is actually at your side and is already at that moment beginning to turn your pretense into reality."