A Matter Of Flying

A Matter of Flying

I couldn’t help but hear. And I really, truly didn’t want to. But the two people seated near me did not keep their voices low. So I heard plenty. One phrase stopped me cold: “I could take the cheating. But not the lying about it.” The other person quickly concurred that cheating was, well, inevitable. But lying was indeed abominable.

Isn’t it interesting where we choose to draw the line when our morality is a self-constructed house of cards? If the partners of these two had cheated on them and then told the truth about it, would that have been perfectly fine?

I was saddened and repulsed and convicted all at once. Saddened by the darkness of the lives of these two. Repulsed by the coarseness of their conversation. But mostly I was convicted about my own propensity to make up ridiculous rules and try to live by them. I desperately need an outside-myself morality because my homemade one is hopelessly corrupt. I am thankful that I know this. I want to get better, but I can’t on my own. C. S. Lewis writes,

Morality is a mountain which we cannot climb by our own efforts; and if we could we should only perish in the ice and unbreathable air of the summit, lacking those wings with which the rest of the journey has to be accomplished. For it is from there that the real ascent begins. The ropes and axes are ‘done away’ and the rest is a matter of flying.^a

I am bound by gravity and weighted down by Adam’s sin and my own. But my God has bright wings of grace, and he swoops low and fast to rescue us when the ropes and axes of self-reliance and self-approval give way. Then the rest “is a matter of flying!”

God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.

2 Corinthians 5:21

^a C. S. Lewis, “Man or Rabbit?” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 113–14.