Why Satan hates simple pleasures.
Maybe the joy of the Lord actually is your strength?
My alarm had gone off 10 minutes ago, and I was just staring out the window as my husband came to kiss me goodbye.
“Okay. Enough’s enough. You’re calling the doctor. Today.”
I must have looked just as much of a zombie as I felt inside. Over the last 3 years, my job at a Christian non-profit had been slowly unravelling me: I was doing more jobs than any single person could manage, surrounded by a hustle culture which had slowly morphed into martyrdom worship.
Not only was I exhausted, but I felt a void inside of me – as if everything that God had made me to be no longer mattered to Him because clearly none of it was benefitting His Kingdom in the way I’d been asked to serve it. My health – both mentally and physically – was declining fast.
Depression was saturating every bone. My auto-immune disease was flaring as cortisol raged through my body, and my joints felt like they were on fire. I’d held on for over 12 months after things started to get really bad, fighting so hard to make changes, to shift my outlook, to find joy in my work and alter my attitude. And yet, here I was, a hallow zombie, crying at the thought that I would need to pry myself out of bed and get behind my computer again.
It was at this rock bottom that I discovered just how much my theology of joy was directly poisoning my understanding of God. I placed so much value on work and sacrifice (which has its place, don’t get me wrong) that I’d completely abandoned any value in pleasure or even simple happiness. But the more I “surrendered” my joy, the less myself I felt, and the more foreign God seemed to me. Less like a Father – more like a ruler. Distant. Unmoved. Indifferent.
This rock bottom forced me to confront the fact that if something didn’t change, my relationship with God might never recover.
“When He talks of their losing their selves, He only means abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His, they will be more themselves than ever.”
The Screwtape Letters, Letter 13
Please don’t misunderstand me: sometimes, our circumstances are hard, and it can be difficult to find the joy in them, yet difficulty itself doesn’t necessarily mean that we are acting outside of God’s will. That said, Screwtape’s 13th Letter resonates SO deeply with me because for a season of my life, the difficulty did actually prove to be a misalignment between my will and God’s.
How do I know this? Well, I can actually take the lessons we learn from Screwtape to best illustrate my point. In this letter (which I break down in this week’s episode with my dear friend, Dusty Hegge), we see Wormwood get a thrashing because he made the fatal mistake of allowing the Patient to enjoy simple pleasures – like reading a good book or going on a walk through the countryside – for no other reason than it brought him joy. Screwtape explains that real pleasure, the kind which God designed for us to experience through Him and through the gift of His creation, will “make [us] feel that [we are] coming home, recovering [ourselves].”
Indeed, it is the simple, sweet, uncomplicated pleasures that are often a road straight to the Divine. In joy, pleasure, and fun, we find ourselves actually less occupied with our own thoughts and more taken by the beauty of the life which surrounds us, mirroring God’s goodness back to us and reaffirming who He designed us to be.
The misery I experienced at my last work place (and no, I do not think misery to be too dramatic a word – if you listen to this week’s episode, you’ll hear me share more of this story) was indeed a red flag bidding me to change my circumstances. Not because God doesn’t allow us, sometimes, to go through struggles (we’re not prosperity gospelists here) but because this particular struggle was fundamentally corrupting my understanding of who God is, who I am, and how He designed me to interact with the world. Doing work I hated, surrounded by people who elevated work over rest, sacrifice over play, struggle over fun, imbalance over balance, and calling it all “service to God” caused me to slowly absorb a message which quite likely makes Satan smile: my delight means nothing to God; He doesn’t care whether I enjoy my life; to love Him is to surrender, and surrender will always be hard.
C.S. Lewis reminds us, though, in one of my favourite letters from Screwtape, that this type of martyrdom gospel couldn’t be further from the truth. Real pleasures (as simple and sweet as losing ourselves in a good book) were authored by God alone, and they invite us into a self-forgetfulness that, when enjoyed from a sincere heart and genuine surrender to the Father, actually allow us to recover ourselves. In my case, it went deeper as I learned how much God invites us to lose ourselves in work we actually enjoy – work that makes us feel closer to Him for all the right reasons.
When we offer ourselves up to Him, He in fact gives us back our true personalities, welcoming us home. Indeed, Lewis’ theology of joy (which I wrote about for HarperCollins last month) underpins one of the truest things I’ve ever known: the more we lose ourselves in the love of a God who delights in our delight, the more we discover who we were actually meant to be all along.
All my love,
Listen to this week’s episode:
Book Club Discussion Questions:
What are some of the simple, easy things in this world which bring you joy?
What do those pleasures teach you about the character of God?
Have you ever experienced a time in which you felt ashamed for experiencing simple, sweet pleasures? How did you overcome the shame? What did God teach you through that experience?
If God is a God who “gives our personality back to us” when we surrender to Him, how would you describe the version of yourself that He created you to be?
What is your favourite line from Screwtape’s 13th Letter?
Links and episode mentions:
Currently reading The Screwtape Letters
Dusty’s website
Dusty on Instagram
Dusty’s Voice Memos podcast
My HarperCollins essay on C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy
Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund
Magic Like This on Instagram
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