Salvation’s bumpy road

Even when animals are storing food for the winter, they are not thinking about how cold it will be or if they’ll starve. They live in the present. But we human beings, God’s children, are different. During large parts of our day, what we consider to be our real life is pushed off into a tapestry of wishes and daydreams and possibilities.

This reminds me of a comment Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves. After referring to life’s “unpleasant things” and “interruptions,” he wrote: “The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day: what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination (Collected Letters, Vol. 2).

In the Spirit’s regeneration of our heart, not one trying experience is valueless. Not one inconvenience is unnecessary. Rather than anticipating a smooth, uneventful expressway, we need to appreciate our journey of salvation for what it is—an original, individual pilgrimage, filled with bumps and bogs and dusty roads!