Pentecost 2026 - Week 1 - Day 3

Good morning.

C.S. Lewis had a gift for saying in a sentence what most of us struggle to articulate in a lifetime. In one of his most famous sermons, later published as The Weight of Glory, he wrote:
The child has never seen the ocean. He has never felt sand under his feet or watched sunlight dance across waves. He has no memory of salt air or wide horizons. The word “sea” means nothing to him.

So he looks down at his mud pies, shrugs, and says no thank you. Not because he prefers filth over beauty in some deliberate, calculated way. But because he cannot imagine anything better than what is already in his hands.

Lewis’ point was not that mud pies are attractive. It was that the child simply has no category for the ocean. He clings to what he knows because he cannot yet see what is better.

That is how the heart works.

We do not cling to lesser things because we are always rebellious or defiant. Often we cling to them because they are familiar. They feel concrete. They are within reach. And when someone tells us to let them go, it can feel like being asked to step into emptiness.
Lewis returned to this same idea years later in The Great Divorce, but this time he told it as a story.

A ghost arrives at the outskirts of heaven with a red lizard sitting on his shoulder. The lizard whispers constantly into his ear—suggesting, tempting, justifying. It represents the man’s old habits, his familiar sins, the desires that have defined him for years. An angel approaches and asks a terrifying question: “May I kill it?”

The man hesitates. He argues. He delays. He is not certain who he would be - without the lizard. At one point he cries out, “It would be better to be dead than to be without it.” The attachment runs that deep. Finally, trembling, he consents.

The angel kills the lizard—and something unexpected happens. The small, ugly creature does not simply disappear. It is transformed into a magnificent white stallion. At the same moment, the ghost becomes solid and strong. What he feared would destroy him becomes the very means of his freedom.

Lewis understood what Thomas Chalmers preached generations earlier: the heart cannot simply be emptied. It must be captured by something greater. The child leaves the mud pies when he sees the sea. The ghost releases the lizard when he trusts the promise of something better.

The Christian life is not sustained by gritting our teeth and staring at what we must give up. It grows as Christ becomes more beautiful than what competes with Him. When we begin to see the weight of His glory, obedience no longer feels like steady loss. It begins to feel like awakening.

Perhaps that is why Jesus speaks of treasure and joy in the same breath.

The issue is not merely what we are trying to stop. The deeper question is what we believe is worth everything. Hmm - that's a lot to ponder first thing in the morning.  Y

ou're welcome!

Prayer
Father,
You know how easily we settle for mud pies. You know how tightly we grip the lizards we have grown used to carrying.
We confess that we often fear surrender because we cannot yet see what You are offering.
Open our eyes.
Show us the beauty of Christ more clearly.
Give us courage to trust that when You remove something harmful, You are not diminishing us—you are transforming us.
By Your Spirit, make our hearts solid.
Make Christ our treasure.
Amen.


PS - I was asked to maket he font bigger - but this is the only size it allows for a text field.  Sorry.

PPS - The book The Great Divorce is probably the best visualization of what heaven might look like.