Com­ing In Out of the Wind

Excerpt from Mere Christianity

The ter­ri­ble thing, the almost impos­si­ble thing, is to hand over your whole self — all your wish­es, and pre­cau­tions — to Christ. But it is far eas­i­er than what we are try­ing to do instead. For what we are try­ing to do is remain what we call ​“our­selves,” to keep per­son­al hap­pi­ness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be ​“good.” We are all try­ing to let our mind and heart go their own way — cen­tered on mon­ey or plea­sure or ambi­tion — and hop­ing, in spite of this, to behave hon­est­ly and chaste­ly and humbly.

And that is what Christ warned us you could not do. As He said, a this­tle can­not pro­duce figs. If I am a field that con­tains noth­ing but grass-seed, I can­not pro­duce wheat. Cut­ting the grass may keep it short: but I shall still pro­duce grass and no wheat. If I want to pro­duce wheat, the change must go deep­er than the sur­face. I must be ploughed up and resown. 

That is why the real prob­lem of the Chris­t­ian life comes where peo­ple do not usu­al­ly look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morn­ing. All your wish­es and hopes for the day rush at you like wild ani­mals. And the first job each morn­ing con­sists sim­ply in shov­ing them all back; in lis­ten­ing to that oth­er voice, tak­ing that oth­er point of view, let­ting that oth­er larg­er, stronger, qui­eter life come flow­ing in. And so on, all day. Stand­ing back from all your nat­ur­al fuss­ings and fret­tings; com­ing in out of the wind. 

We can only do it for moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be spread­ing through our sys­tem: because now we are let­ting Him work at the right part of us. It is the dif­fer­ence between paint, which is mere­ly laid on the sur­face, and a dye or stain which soaks right through. 

He nev­er talked vague, ide­al­is­tic gas. When He said, ​“Be per­fect,” He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treat­ment. It is hard; but the sort of com­pro­mise we are all han­ker­ing after is hard­er – in fact, it is impos­si­ble. It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird; it would be a jol­ly sight hard­er for it to learn to fly while remain­ing an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you can­not go on indef­i­nite­ly being just an ordi­nary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.