If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality. If you are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry. Once a man is united to God , how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?

~ from Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis.

A wall-eyed pike is put into an aquarium. He is fed for some days with little minnows. Then, in the middle of the experiment, a glass partition is placed down the middle of the aquarium so that the pike is now confined to one side.

Then the researchers drop the minnows on the other side. Immediately, the pike goes for the minnows, but he hits himself against the glass. He circles and hits it again. He tries a third time, but he is now hitting the glass a little less hard. After a few more times, he’s just sort of nosing up against the glass. He has a feeling he’s not going to get those minnows. Pretty soon, he just swims around in circles and ignores the minnows on the other side.

At that point, those doing the experiment take out the glass. The minnows come right up against the gills of the pike and he doesn’t even try to eat them.

The experiment ends when the wall-eyes pike starves to death. He’s convinced he’s not going to get those minnows, so there’s no point in wasting his time or hurting his nose again. That is the best image of cultural blindness I have heard. I wanted to weep when I first heard it, but I realized that the experiment is about human beings, not about fish. That’s much of the human story, people spiritually starving in the midst of plenty. They don’t know how to eat.

-from Job and the Mystery of Suffering by Richard Rohr

This is an amazingly accurate metaphor for us, I believe. Starving in the midst of plenty.

The incredible, overwhelming, ginormous truth that is ever hiding right out in the open is this–we already have everything we need at this, and at every, moment.

We can always turn to God.

Only the eyes of faith are able to see this.

There is always a great feast sitting on the table.

Always.

Whether we see it, eat it, acknowledge it, or not.

I hear Jesus saying to us, “You can turn to me at any time.”

The Bread of Life, which leaves you hungry for nothing more, is always on the table ready to be taken and ingested.

God is always available to the diligent seeker, who approaches in utter humility, with a contrite heart, empty of self. We are free and able to connect with Christ at any moment of any day, if we but desire Him. I mean, truly desire HIM beyond all else.

The energy of God is ever flowing all around, in, and through us. We may tap into it whenever we so choose. We may stop whatever we are doing and thinking at any point, and turn our attention fully to Christ and rest in Him. When your attention is turned wholly to one thing, it is, by default, turned away from all others. Turning to the one thing needed, turns you away from all that matters not.

Is there any greater gift than this?

Is there anything simpler?

Is there anything more essential?

Is there anything more hidden?

“You can turn to me at any time.”

We need nothing else than to turn the gaze of our soul upon God in focused attention, and all will be made clear, for perspective shall miraculously become “unwarped” from its off-center state. Such intense focus on Christ, which blinds us to all else, is peace indeed–and worth fighting for.

Your healing presence absorbed, dear Jesus, is everything. May all other activity and thought take its rightful, very distant, second place to this!

There is plenty of food on the table. Minnows are constantly swimming right up to your gills. You may partake whenever you choose. What’s stopping you?

Justification by faith means that I have nothing else on which to depend except my receptivity to what I can never own or manage. And this very capacity to receive cannot be the result of effort. Faith is something given, not achieved. It is created by God’s word in Christ.

-H.A. Williams

When I attempt to make myself virtuous, the me I can thus organize and discipline is no more the me of which I am aware. And it is precisely the equation of my total self with this one small part of it which is the root cause of all sin. This is the fundamental mistake often made in exhortation to repentance and amendment. They attempt to confirm me in my lack of faith by getting me to organize the self I know against the self I do not know.

-H.A. Williams

Fix your thoughts upon what ought to come to pass, and not upon the things you dislike. Let the things we oppose die of neglect. For we help everything we think about.

-Frank Laubach

No matter what the last hour may have been, it is past, and we live in this moment, to make it as fine as we can in thought and deed. Never let the sins or errors of the last hour poison this! “Snap out of it” instantly, and, lo, a new fresh page is turned. He who adopts the philosophy of instantaneous new beginnings has the secret of peace.

-Frank Laubach

Forty-seven times in the Gospel of John, Jesus said He was under God’s orders, and that He never did anything, never said anything, until His Father gave the command. He was listening every moment of the day to His invisible companion and saying, “Yes.” This perfect obedience was what made Him one with His Father and what gave the Father perfect confidence in the Son. It is the reason the Father loves the Son so fondly.

-Frank Laubach