i wanted to be out of the house, and also finish reading before my life gets busy again. i went to fishermans wharf to finish mere christianity. i read from 154 to 227 with ghibli music playing in my airpods. it was a good read. it's another book i will be referencing over and over again in my life. faith isn't a destination but a journey, it's the striving and goal of becoming more like jesus, that i become a christian, there is no end goal. no prize to win.

on faith

“People are often worried. They are told they ought to love God. They cannot find any such feeling in themselves. What are they to do? The answer is the same as before. Act as if you did. Do not sit trying to manufacture feelings. Ask yourself, ‘If I were sure that I loved God, what would I do?’ When you have found the answer, go and do it.”

on forgiveness

“After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.”

on evil

“Good and evil both increase at compound interest.”

on sin

“We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because he was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means.”

on pride

“That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God.”

“The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.”

on giving

“The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.”

on christians

“The world does not consist of 100 percent Christians and 100 percent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so. ”

on prayer

“If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.”

on time

“Almost certainly God is not in time. His life does not consist of moments one following another...Ten-thirty-- and every other moment from the beginning of the world--is always Present for Him. If you like to put it this way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.”

on love

“Love is the great conqueror of lust.”