Trying and Failing

I thought this excerpt from C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity) would be a good follow-up to yesterday's post:

We cannot discover our failure to keep God's law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say, there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that, if we try harder next time, we shall succeed in being completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense, it is not trying that is ever going to bring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, "You must do this. I can't."

All this trying.... It is one of those essentially Christian contradictions that we must try to follow God's law, and that we most certainly cannot succeed. But as Lewis explains, without trying, we never realize our inability to succeed. The trying is the thing that creates the realization in us that we need God.

Only when we try to be better, try to follow and then fail, do we become aware of the true enormity of our own emptiness. The disciplines of Lent - quiet, solitude and prayer, trying to fast and to be generous - think of these as creating in us the necessary opportunities to fail. Thanks be to God!