Loving our bondage

An inmate I was visiting commented that some guys show up in prison in such bad shape that he looks at them and thinks, "That wasn't an arrest; it was a deliverance." There is freedom, and then there is just rope to hang yourself.

I wonder if most of us wake up in the morning to a variety of bondages, and we put them on like a pair of pants, because we're used to them. It's worse than that: We don't even want to be free of them. There is a man in C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce who is hagridden by an annoying lizard (lust) on his shoulder day and night. Yet when an angel offers to kill it, he doesn't want to:

"There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy-that is, to reality. . . . The time comes when, though the pleasure becomes less and less and the craving fiercer and fiercer, and though he knows that joy can never come that way, yet he prefers to joy the mere fondling of unappeasable lust, and would not have it taken from him. He'd fight to the death to keep it. He'd like well to be able to scratch: but even when he can scratch no more, he'd rather itch than not."

How do you figure? Our bondages are ruining our lives-and still we hold on to them for dear life. Why? It seems to me we don't really believe that God has anything to offer that we would like better. Heaven has always seemed boring to those who live in darkness. It's just a matter of not believing God, I guess.

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