Spokes of a Wheel

What God cares about is not exactly our actions. What He cares about is that we should be creatures of a certain kind or quality--the kind of creatures He intended us to be--creatures related to Himself in a certain way. I do not add 'and related to one another in a certain way', because that is included: if you are right with Him you will inevitably be right with all your fellow-creatures, just as if all the spokes of a wheel are fitted rightly into the hub and the rim they are bound to be in the right positions to one another. And as long as a man is thinking of God as an examiner who has set him a sort of paper to do, or as the opposite party in a sort of bargain--as long as he is thinking of claims and counter-claims between himself and God--he is not yet in the right relation to Him. He is misunderstanding what he is and what God is. And he cannot get into the right relation until he has discovered the fact of our bankruptcy.

When I say 'discovered', I mean really discovered: not simply said it parrot-fashion. Of course, any child, if given a certain kind of religious education, will soon learn to say that we have nothing to offer to God that is not already His own and that we find ourselves failing to offer even that without keeping something back. But I am talking of really discovering this: really finding out by experience that it is true.
~C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, (1952)

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On this day:

1952 C.S. Lewis was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Literature by LaVal University in Quebec.
(from Around the Year With C.S. Lewis and His Friends)