biddings

This is one of my favorite conversations from Perelandra by CS Lewis. It really captures the heart of my favorite Puritan prayer: "Lord, whatever you give I will receive, and whatever you take, I will let go." Stinking hard words to say and even harder words to live......

Lady: One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one’s mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before—that the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished—if it were possible to wish—you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.

Ransom: “And have you no fear,” said Ransom, “that it will ever be hard to turn your heart from the thing you wanted to the thing Maleldil (the Lord) sends?”

Lady: “But how can one wish any of those waves not to reach us which Maleldil is rolling toward us?......who thought of its being hard? The beasts would not think it hard if I told them to walk on their heads. It would become their delight to walk on their heads. I am His beast, and all His biddings are joys.