Author Ken Gire says it best from his book Windows of the Soul, “The pursuit of self is what most of us have been doing for much of our lives, even our spiritual lives. But the self is a cul-de-sac, and eventually we end up where we started. Footsore and just as frustrated, just as unfulfilled. Feeling we’re a failure, or worse, a fraud.”

The reasons I believe “self” is hard to escape from is threefold:

1. We have to look at our “selves” in the mirror;
2. We have to live with our “selves” meaning all we’ve done in this life; and
3. We have to feel our “selves” meaning the physical and emotional hurts that we experience.

So to disregard self is not an easy thing to accomplish, plus our “self” gets in the way. And going in circles, like the cul-de-sac Gire described, gets old.

It’s ironic when the Christmas season arrives I don’t get tired of watching our Lionel train go round and round the tree over and over and over. I love trains and I guess it’s just one of those crazy holiday traditions that many of us adhere to, one excuse of many to become kids again.

I knew when I first let our three-year old granddaughter, Charlotte, play with my train, she’d knock it off track. She was more interested in picking it up and examining it, trying to figure out what makes it move, instead of letting it encircle the presents that are waiting to be opened on Christmas morning.

Charlotte tries and tries but she can’t put the train back on the track correctly. In her frustration, she looks up at me. “Poppie, can you help me?” How can a grandfather resist that request? I patiently pick up the locomotive and each railcar one at a time and place them back on the track. “Hurry Poppie hurry!” She wants a quick fix.

Like grown-ups, and this writer, sometimes we have a hard time staying on track as we respond to the cards life deals us. Does God “allow” us to get knocked off track so we will come to Him for help because our rote ways are getting us nowhere?

From the late, great C.S. Lewis: “God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.” (Mere Christianity, pg.50)

As I wrote in journal #72 on October 25, 2024:
“I can’t get away from you God. So I encircle around the tree–the cross, knowing that I can talk to you because of Jesus, the great Mediator, who came to earth to die. The One who endured naked shame on a tree. The One who endured the pain and suffering of a crown of thorns, nails and a pierced side on a tree. The One who cried, bled and died on a tree.”

If you don’t have real peace this Christmas season, doesn’t it make sense to seek the divine Engineer. He knows the railcar you live in better than you do, and He knows how to stay on the track ahead.