Do you ever find yourself complaining to God about all those “things” that keep getting in the way of what you want your life to be? If only, we tell ourselves, all the distractions of life could be removed, we could really live. We even get quite spiritual about it and confidently assert we would be so much better Christians without all those distractions.
In one of his letters to a friend, C. S. Lewis addressed this, calling out this attitude for what it is:
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own,” or “real” life. 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. This at least is what I see at moments of insight: but it’s hard to remember it all the time.
Whenever we rail against the “interruptions” in our life, we are being supremely selfish. It takes practice—and I haven’t achieved total success in this yet—but the more we reorient our thinking on this point, the more we will take on God’s perspective, and the more useful we will be to Him to carry out His purposes. After all, we are supposed to be living for Him, not ourselves, right?