Eyes on the Prize.

In one week I will be lounging in one of these 8 infinity pools overlooking the Caribbean.  I am pretty sure if four fights break out during cafeteria duty again this week, I will just let my mind float away to a happy place I will soon inhabit in the near future. : )

My Life, as Seen by CS Lewis.

From the Screwtape Letters:

I am almost glad to hear that he is still a churchgoer and a communicant.  I know there are dangers in this; but anything is better than that he should realise the break he has made with the first months of his Christian life.  As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is much the same as it was six weeks [or two years] ago.  And while he thinks that, we do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognised sin, but only with his vague, though uneasy, feeling that he hasn’t been doing very well lately.

This dim uneasiness needs careful handling.  If it gets too strong it may wake him up and spoil the whole game.  On the other hand, if you suppress it entirely — which, by the by, the Enemy will probably not allow you to do — we lose an element in the situation which can be turned to good account.  If such a feeling is allowed to live, but not allowed to become irresistible and flower into real repentance, it has one invaluable tendency.  It increases the patient’s reluctance to think about the Enemy. All humans at nearly all times have some such reluctance; but when thinking of Him involves facing and intensifying a whole vague cloud of half-conscious guilt, this reluctance is increased tenfold.  They hate every idea that suggests Him, just as men in financial embarrassment hate the very sight of a pass-book.  In this state your patient will not omit, but he will increasingly dislike, his religious duties.

As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo, you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. …  You can make him do nothing at all for long periods of time.  You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room.  All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at least he may say, ‘I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.’

The Christians describe the Enemy as one ‘without whom Nothing is strong.’  And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness.  But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy.  It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick.

Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

—

Good work, Wormwood.  Mission accomplished.

Random.

My sister got engaged yesterday!  I would like her ring to be mine.  In fact, I wore her ring around for a few hours before she got it.  Hehe.  I’m bad, I know.  Sometimes I feel bad for her that I’m her sister.  Sorry unnie!  Sucks to be you!  This is what you get for spinning me off chairs when we were little!  A lifetime of retribution. <3

I gave up shopping for Lent.  I’m feeling a bit empty inside, and I swear Gap is suddenly releasing millions of coupons.  Either that or I’m just so depressed that I notice it more.  I still check all my deal sites on a daily basis, just to further my misery.  I need to stop that.

I’ve been telling everybody to watch the glorious Bieber movie.  There weren’t too many takers, but I somehow convinced my parents to watch it.  They watched it in 3D together and called me immediately afterwards, raving about how glorious it was.  More Beliebers!  My mom said my dad (who falls asleep during every movie) especially enjoyed it and was super into it.  I love the parentals.

My kids this semester are the best I’ve ever had.  They really make teaching fun and enjoyable.  They do frequently tell me that I should consider alternate professions like being a prison guard or a drill sargeant though, but it’s okay, I still like them a lot.

I was thinking about my college years recently, and I realized I entered U of I almost 10 years ago.  During my freshman year, I carried around a Discman, didn’t have a cell phone, used xanga, had a camera with film, recorded live vhs footage of every JT television appearance due to the absence of youtube, and had a maximum email capacity of 15 megabytes.  Also, I looked like a boy.  Those were the dayz.

My Proud Old Heart.

I wonder what happens to the human heart as we get older.  I thought it made sense to think that we naturally got stronger with age, but maybe that’s not the case at all.  When I think about my college days, there seemed to be this hunger and desire to learn and change and grow that now seems to have greatly diminished (if not disappeared altogether).  It was like every rebuke that somebody offered back in the day would incite this self-probing reaction to discover whether or not there was any validity to their words.  I was so unsure of who I was and what I stood for that I felt the need to ponder everything deeply in an effort to figure myself out.

Now, nearly a decade after I first entered college (wow. I’m old), I would like to think that my heart has grown stronger with the extra years under my belt.  But instead, it seems like it has grown weaker and more fragile.  At this age, I feel like I should know who I am — my strengths, my weaknesses, my faults – and what it is that I stand for.  The identity crisis seemed much more age-appropriate when I was 18, but now as a working professional five years removed from those younger college days, shouldn’t I have myself figured out by now (whatever that means)?  Shouldn’t I know what my heart-motive is?  Shouldn’t I know whether I believe in heart motives at all?  I feel like I should, so I grab hold of something to convince myself that I do indeed know myself.  And now it seems that anything that might run contrary to this image I have of myself incites a defensive reaction, one that is hardened and no longer able to think, “Hm…maybe I don’t really know myself.”  I am much too ingrained in my thought patterns that I can’t really entertain the idea that maybe I’m wrong about myself.  Pride has surely gotten the best of me, and my weak little heart can’t bear to think that it’s clueless after all.

I’m thinking about getting into a little reading this month, maybe revisiting some of my favorite books that used to speak much needed light into my dark, narrow-minded life.  I know I can’t continue with my present mindset, but I don’t know how to (or maybe don’t want it bad enough to put in the effort to) change either.  Story of my life.  Book suggestions appreciated.