"[The natural life] knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that."
- C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity
I have tried, multiple times in my life, to ignore God. I have never decidedly walked away from him in the sense that I didn't believe in him anymore, but there have been times when I have refused to listen to his voice in every way. I still prayed. I still went to church. I still assured him that I wanted his will to be done. And yet I refused to listen to him because of my selfishness.
These seasons of ignorance have resulted in very dark times during which I felt a very deep absence of joy. I usually tried to account for this absence with various excuses or explanations that never even slightly touched on the truth: I was ignoring God.
Over the course of this summer I have been learning a lot about God's love. This deep, infinite, undeserved love has become more and more real to me. It is a holy love - a love that is angered by injustice and hurt when its object chooses to walk away. A love that is relentless and passionate. And it has been through learning about this love that I have realized that I am happiest when I allow it to overwhelm me.
You see, those moments when I chose to ignore God were usually brought on because he was trying to save me from myself. He could see that I was doing things that were destroying me - things that were distancing myself from Him. And he loves me so much that he was calling to me, urging me to see the destruction happening and run back to his arms. But I refused. I didn't see it as love. I saw it as rules. I saw God as a police officer trying to keep me in line.
But even when I refused to listen, God loved me enough to go a step farther. He has, on each occasion, removed from my life the very thing that was causing my destruction. And although this has caused me a whole lot of pain and grief, and although I was always angry at him for allowing it to happen, I see it now through different eyes.
It was his love.
I can look back on each of these times and see, with ever-thankful eyes, that he was only saving me from myself. How foolish I was to blame him for my unhappiness and pain when he was gently drawing me towards a deeper joy that far surpassed anything I was trying to find for myself. He was pulling me, kicking and screaming, into his love. And, on top of all that, his incredible mercy and grace were also freely offered. He immediately forgave every hint of rebellion lurking in my heart and offered me a new way of life. He is the Healer of my every sorrow and regret. As it says in Psalm 32, "what joy for those whose record the Lord has cleared of guilt."
This whole realization has been a very slow process. I also know that it is far easier to say this, in hindsight, than it will be to recognize it if and when it happens again. But it's a step. I can delight in the joy of knowing that God calls to me not so that I will follow a rule book, but because he loves me more than I will ever understand, and I can let that love overwhelm me.
"God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense."
- C.S. Lewis - The Problem of Pain
