Grace: the best experience you could ever have!

...I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant covert in all England. I did not see then what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the gates to a prodigal son who is brought in kicking, struggling resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and his compulsion is our liberation.

C.S.Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Glasgow:Collins Fontana 1955, p.182

~~~

On the road between God and me

I struggled, piling the

stones of my failures, the

rocks of my sins, and the

boulders of my despair.

He found me there,

bowed low before this mounded

altar of my unworthiness.

'I built the hill of Golgotha with those stones,'

He said.

'Arise, and follow me

singing!'

Susan Lenkes,

in Selwyn Hughes, Every Day with Jesus, Sunbury,Middlesex:CWR, July/August 1990