orange juice

I mostly use orange juice for its medicinal qualities. It has stacks of vitamin C in it, so whenever I get a sore throat, that's where I go. I've also got an ingrained sense that sensations of stinging are produced by something good acting forcefully against something bad, and its acidity lends itself quite well to that mentality. Right now, I'm sipping a wineglass of pulp-filled orange juice, because I feel awful. I've got a sore throat, a temperature, no energy and I've taken the day off uni (my one hour of it today) because I couldn't stand the thought of it and my head hurts too much.

For some reason I just felt like I should blog.

I've been listening to a recording of C.S. Lewis' novel The Screwtape Letters, read by John Cleese. It's great :o) It's also pointing out many areas of my life that are out-of-shape - the most prominent of these being prayer, contentedness and the purpose of marriage/relationships. It's quite a journey at times, doing my head in completely.

For instance, one point he made was that while we are lead to believe that the future is for the taking, and that you should reach out and grab the future with both hands, and as such the future is something which only hero-like characters tend to attain - well, the future is coming to all of us, "at a rate of sixty minutes every hour", whether we fuss over it or not! When I heard this, suddenly what Jesus said about not worrying about tomorrow made a little more sense to me. It's totally unnecessary to worry about tomorrow, not only because God's going to provide all that you need for tomorrow, but also because all that He has planned for you tomorrow will happen! Only He knows what that is, but so what? If He's going to give you what you need to deal with it anyway, why worry? So there's a 100% certainty that some kind of future will be your present before much time has passed, and there's also a 100% certainty that you don't have to worry about it.

Now to someone who doesn't like change, those numbers are pretty darn encouraging, so I should let go of that petty fear and just take care of what's happening in the present with what God's provided for it.

It also states a good case for why we should be content in all circumstances. If God thought you were lacking anything that you really need at any point in time, He would give it.

He tells us that if we lack anything, we only need ask and He will give. This almost seems like a stop-gap! But it isn't really. God is aware of our needs even before we are, but I think often God withholds some things because our need for strengthened reasoning and strengthened faith is greater than our need for what we're asking for. So, when we see something we lack (not want, mind you - different kettle of fish), we reason that God is good, that God has said He would give if we ask, and then we make our reason grow courageous - we ask in faith that God would give that thing which we lack. How gloriously merciful is God to make a mechanism like that - that in one process He calls to our minds His goodness, He grows us in Reasoning and its big brother Faith, and He gives us what we need to live in the day He's given us. He's taking care of more of our needs that we're even aware of at the time.

And so we come full circle! If God's taking care of what we're not even aware of, why worry about what we are aware of?