I want to be friends with C.S. Lewis. (And I think that he would want to be friends with me.)

I love C.S. Lewis. I love how he thinks and how he writes and how he believes. I love that you can literally feel his conviction and his passion and sense his wisdom and his wit in every word he writes. As I was reading the last chapter of "Mere Christianity" last night, the following passage struck me in one of those.."Um..YEA" kind of ways. Like..."Woah, Clive, you are so right and you make so much sense." So I'm going to post it now because I feel that it is extremely relevant to my life journey over the last six months or so, and the journey that I am embarking on in the coming months as well.

...."The more we get what we now call 'ourselves' out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of 'little Christs,' all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented-as an author invents characters in a novel-all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selvs are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to 'by myself' without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surrounding and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call 'Myself' becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call "my wishes' become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men's thoughts or even suggested to my by devils. Eggs and alcohol and a good night's sleep will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideas. I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I liek to believe: most of what I call 'me' can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

....Unless you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most 'natural men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.

...The principle runs through all 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 back nothing. 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."

I skipped around a bit and left out a few sentences here and there. You should definitely just read the whole book; it's life-changing. It's one of those that I always thought about reading and intended to read, but just hadn't. I'm glad I finally did. Oh Clive Staples Lewis, you are a stand-up guy.

Jenna