MY life, MY time...Is this Reality?

Now as to the rest of the letters that have impacted me today [this was in March] I was going to go through them systematically in numerical order, but I can see that the Lord has different plans. I was over Dustin’s house and he mentioned how much we value our schedules and time in America. How we protect it. That comment I told him immediately reminded me of what I read in the Screwtape letters.

It is the 21^st letter starting on page 95: “Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, >>page 96 therefore that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered. Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him. It is the unexpected visitor (when he looked forward to a quit evening), or the friend’s talkative wife (turning up when he looked forward to a tete-a-tete with the friend), that throws him out of gear.”

Wow that quote couldn’t have said it better. This is so true of myself. Screwtape goes on

“They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen. You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own.’ Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.”

Screwtape goes on to say that Wormwood shouldn’t try to keep this lie intact through a logical argument because there is no argument for it. It is nonsense. Humans don’t really ‘own’ anything. If God were to come down now in bodily form to the Christian and ask for all that man’s time for the day he would obediently comply, in theory he says. So the simple jargon “my time is my own,” will suffice and it, according to Screwtape, is better left covered completely in darkness never brought the front of the person’s mind, because it is ridiculous. If the man ever questions it the assumption “my time is my own’ will be exposed as it really is…ABSURD, says Screwtape. “The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels [an item of personal property]”

As I was reading I was convicted at how much I say "God what do you want me to do with my time?" I chuckled as I told Dustin about this. More to come...