I remember a Monday morning when I woke up and remembered that I’d finally become eligible for long service leave, and that if I didn’t want to, I wouldn’t have to go to work that day. But the strange thing was, my next thought was that I’d actually prefer to go to work that day. It taught me one of the great lessons of life: that even the most onerous of things become acceptable when you have a choice and decide to do them, rather than being made to.
C.S. Lewis said the same about our relationship with God. People often think of it as a kind of bargain in which God says, ‘If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.’ But the truth is that every time we make a choice we are turning our innermost self into something a little different from what it was before – something in tune with God, or the opposite.