Authors Charles and Janet Morris begin Chapter 6 (“The Great Dilemma”) of Missing Jesus with a favorite story an avid golfing friend of theirs likes to tell. One day, as the friend teed off, the ball went sailing into the rough. The friend was startled to hear a loud, raspy voice behind him say, “Oh, no!” He turned around, but all he could see was a big, black raven perched in a tree. Just as his playing partner hit his ball, the raven cried out, “Oh, no!”
It turns out that the raven had been hanging out in that tree for years and had learned to mimic the most common response of the golfers teeing off. Charles and Janet observe that sometimes our Christian life can feel like that- one “Oh, no!” after another. We feel frustrated by continued setbacks or by our lack of sustained growth, even though we know that Jesus died for us and that we are His children. As C. S. Lewis once said, the great dilemma of the Christian faith is that while we “become seriously concerned with goodness”, we can’t seem to walk down that road without falling into a pit. In Mere Christianity he wrote:
“We must go from being confident about our efforts to the state in which we despair of doing anything for ourselves and leave it to God. . . . The sense in which a Christian leaves it to God is that he puts all his trust in Christ. . . . Christ offers us something for nothing. In a sense, the whole Christian life consists in accepting that very remarkable offer.”
Today’s question: Following your vocation loss, what brought you to the point of leaving your situation to God? Please share.
Tomorrow’s blog: “Boast in the Lord”
