The following quote is from C.S. Lewis, in his book The Screwtape Letters, a fictional collection of letters between a senior tempter (Screwtape) and his student/understudy (Wormwood). While fictional, I suspect that the book is filled with truth. Their “patient” is a Christian man who is dimly aware that his spiritual state is not what it ought to be, but he doesn’t want to face that reality. Here, Screwtape is giving advice to the junior tempter.

As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes but also in conversations with those he cares nothing about, on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.”

Lewis’ unspoken thesis is that, ultimately what a person truly, deeply likes is also what he ought to be doing. As exhibit A, I would bring forth my wife. She truly and deeply likes many things. I am one of those things, but just one. She also likes the following, most of which also benefits me greatly:

• Cooking and baking.
• Getting nice, thoughtful gifts for others.
• Working with ladies who are pregnant and in need of some help.
• Growing beautiful flowers.

This is only a partial list, but it gives you some insight into why I love her more every day. Even if (God forbid!) she should suddenly cease to be able to do all or any of these things, I would cherish the memory of her doing them. I believe that God would remember them and cherish them infinitely more.

Exhibit B: My Ph. D. advisor, Dr. David Firth. I connected with him at the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Denver this week, and I asked me how he had accomplished so much as a scholar. I can scarcely think of an Old Testament book that he hasn’t reviewed. The first thing that he said was something to the effect that a Bible scholar and teacher is something that he is, not simply something that he does. God has called him to be and to do this work. He enjoys his work for the most part, and he puts in from 50-55 hours a week in his studies and teaching.

All of us have something that God has called us to be and to do. It will probably be what we like to do, at least most of the time. Originally, the title of this post was “Doing What We Like or What We Ought.” But ul timately, in a well-lived life, what we are is what we will do, and we will do what we like.