Mid-life crisis?

Sometimes I wonder whether I'm having a mid-life crisis. I always thought it would happen early for me but 31-going-on-32 is a little too early in my opinion. Perhaps it's a pre-mid-life crisis and I still have the real one left to look forward to. Then I could have an excuse to do a GNP 4.5 blog - or whatever the new technology is 14 years from now. =)

In the Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis (via Screwtape) talks about the "law of Undulation". Specifically:

Their nearest approach to constancy is undulation - the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life - his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth, periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty ...

Now, it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.

Perhaps this "mid-life crisis" is really just a temporary "trough". And perhaps its length and depth are some indication of favor from above. That last statement's a little uncomfortable. A part of me really wants it to be true and another part of me is ashamed of the lack of humility in that statement. Of the seven deadly sins, pride is by far my biggest challenge. For the moment, I can't get past it. Even when I am humble, I take pride in it. As Screwtape says:

All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, "By jove! I'm being humble," and almost immediately pride - pride at his own humility - will appear. If he awakes to the danger and tried to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt - and so on, through as many stages as you please.

Chapter XIV of the book (of which this is an excerpt) does an excellent job of discussing pride. My other favorite quote from this chapter is the following (related to people trying to downplay thier talents in the interest of humility):

By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty woman trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it, and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible.

Lewis (via Screwtape) goes on to say that "when they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours."

What an interesting post. Mid-life crisis, the law of Undulation, deadly sins, and love for thy neighbor all rolled into one. I didn't see that coming but that's the beauty of this blog - at least for me. It forces me to put my thoughts down on paper and that leads to some unexpected connections.