Small Things

The sort of person you are is something that is not just proved in the big things, like jumping in front of a subway to save a man who fell onto the tracks. It is something you resolve to be in everyday life, and you have to make the choice again, and again, and again.

You do not invite someone over once and call yourself forever hospitable. You do not forgo unmarried passion once and forever call yourself chaste, you do not hold your temper once and call yourself peaceful.

C.S. Lewis has described Jesus as a man who must have faced seemingly infinitely strong temptation, because temptation is often something that yells louder and louder in your ear the longer you resist it - this he said to answer those who claim that Jesus, in being perfect, must have had an easier time resisting than those of us who fall.

Faithfulness is something I must choose daily, and it is always the harder road. To believe God for another day, though the disappointments cry for me to walk away. To set aside my money, my time, my leisure and serve others is not something that is done once and then becomes a new autopilot.

To follow the path of least resistance is a broad, easy way that leads to destruction. The narrow, difficult path that leads to life is one where everything tells you to turn aside to the other path but, like climbing a mountain, though there are many paths that are easy and downhill - it is the one that is difficult and uphill that you have to take to reach your destination. And so it is in choosing to go up when you want to go down - and doing so again, and again, and again, and again that we show ourselves to be faithful or unfaithful.

It is not easy. And I do not know what the destination will look like in my life. I have only the written records of a man who said it would be worth it.