The original you already are…

Yesterday, I gave you the last two paragraphs of a good book. Today, I’ll give you a taste of the last paragraph of my favorite book, Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis. I’ve found that reading Lewis is an acquired taste kinda like a cold beer. My first taste of beer was not a welcome one. I thought it bitter and lingering. Now, however, I love a cold one on a hot summers day and find it really refreshing. I’ve developed a taste for it, you would say.

If this is your first taste of Lewis, sip him slowly. Overtime you just may find his words are thirst quenching…

“Your real, new self will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep nothing back. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”

God, help me become the original I already am. God, help me overcome my fear, my laziness, my fixation on others, and my absorption with my natural self. God, help me find my true identity in You.

God, help me…