I have been fairly convicted by recent experience, including a talk by Fr. Larry Richards and C.S Lewis 'The problem of Pain.' I thought I was doing pretty good until I heard these two guys.
Fr. Larry:
You gotta have daily committed prayer. You don't TRY to fit God into your.
day; you build your day around God...do you TRY to eat every day? Do
you TRY to read the paper every day? How about if your relationship with
your wife was like that? Every day in the morning after you wake up and do
your stuff, you go to see your wife with your book of poems. And you read
her a beautiful poem. And then you say "Shhhh!" And then you go
about the rest of your day, and you're one of these real good husbands because
you pick up the phone, call her and say, "Thank you for everything you've ever
done for me: SHhhhhh." and then you hang up. You go home from work
and your wife has made you a beautiful dinner, and every day you say the same
words, "Thank you for this wonderful dinner." And then you shove it down
your throat and never talk to her during your dinner time. After that, you
show that you're in that 1% of great husbands by saying "Thanks for that dinner,
it was really great." Next its off to read the paper or watch TV, and
right before you go to bed, you walk in to see your spouse with your book of
poems, and you read her the same poem every night... or the same 5 poems... or
'let's try something different tonite' and you try a different poem. And
after you do this for 50 years, what kind of relationship would that be
gentlemen? It would STINK. And that's our relationship with
God. We say our prayers, but we don't enter into a relationship
C.S. Lewis:
"We try, when we wake, to lay the new day at God's feet; but
before we have finished shaving, it becomes our day and God's share in it is
felt as a tribute which we must pay out of 'our own' pocket, a deduction
from the time which ought, we feel, to be 'our own'.
OUCH!
