Choose This Day
With a quote from That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis
In his great work Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey wrote about the importance of using first principles as our guide in life’s decisions. First principles, as he used the term, are core truths used as a foundation to direct our course through any variety of situations. Many of us would say we have some set of moral principles which are more important to us than immediate pleasure or happiness, yet we all fall short of those principles. In the moment, it is easy to be short sighted and seek instant gratification, even if it could potentially cause pain in ourselves or those we love in some cases.
C.S. Lewis created a character who wonderfully represents these tendencies in all of us to rely on our own immediate desires to find joy and happiness in his science fiction novel That Hideous Strength. Mark Studdock receives a once in a lifetime opportunity to work with the elites in the National Institute for Cooperative Experiments (NICE) and he desperately wants to fit in. NICE is obviously a good group; everyone says they are pushing for great things! I mean, they are called NICE for crying out loud! The club starts by asking him to complete mundane tasks, and he longs for something grander. They trickle work his way slowly at first, making him feel that he is being accepted into their network of good and important people. But eventually, as he feels he is becoming an established part of the group, they ask him to commit an obvious crime:
“This was the first thing Mark had been asked to do which he himself, before he did it, clearly knew to be criminal. But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; certainly, there was no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. There may have been a time in the world’s history when such moments fully revealed their gravity…. But, for him, it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men.”
Mark, if asked, would have said he was trying to provide his wife a comfortable living situation when he first joined this group. He thought to himself that this group had a worthy cause, and he would be helping the world to be a better place. But these thoughts and excuses were really nothing more than a thin veil over his immediate desires to fit in with the crowd. He did not have fixed in his mind true principles and so was led a little at a time by his peers into an ends-justify-the-means mentality, lying to his wife and himself and others to achieve his supposedly good goals. A well-known and oft-quoted scripture in Joshua 24:15 says:
“And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve… but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
The time to choose who or what we will serve is now, before the laughter of friends and acquaintances and strangers pulls us into doing very bad things when we are not yet very bad men.
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