I’ve just started reading John Piper’s “When I Don’t Desire God: How to Fight for Joy” and the opening chapter has one of my favourite C.S. Lewis quotes, from a little letter called “Meditation in a toolshed” (the link will take you to a PDF of it. It will be the best 4 pages/10 minutes you spend this week!)
It’s all about “pleasures” and I think it’s fab!
“Pleasures are shafts of glory as it strikes our sensibility… But aren’t there bad, unlawful pleasures? Certainly they are. But in calling them “bad pleasures” I take it we are using a kind of shorthand. We mean “pleasures snatched by unlawful acts.” It is the stealing of the apples that is bad, not the sweetness. The sweetness is steal a beam from the glory… I have tried since… to make every pleasure into a channel of adoration. I don’t mean simply by giving thanks for it. One must of course give thanks, but I mean something different… Gratitude exclaims, very properly, “How good of God to give me this.” Adoration says, “What must be the quality of that being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!” One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun… If this is Hedonism, it is also a somewhat arduous discipline. But it is worth some labour.”
Tim Goldsmith 
Love the photo Timbo and am trying to come to terms with the Lewis reading….
Hope all your family are going along OK and you see them in that amazing beam of light…..
Lewis is a genius! I have had a “toolshed” moment myself, when driving over the Anzac bridge. Such an ordinary piece of architecture when you see it from a distance, like from the other side of the harbour. But from the perspective of one driving over it… the way the angles of the cables shift… I am in raptures every time. It is a truly beautiful experience. Like its a bridge made for the joy of the one experiencing it, rather than the onlooker. It has made me think, even before Lewis clarified the thoughts for me, that as much as someone inquires, critiques and evaluates the Christian faith from the outside, it may be that the real beauty of a living relationship with Jesus can only really be appreciated when you have one.