This is a translation of a scriptural meditation from the Russian book, “Day by Day”:
Scripture: “Uphold me, and I will be saved” (Psalms: 119: 117)
Meditation:
"Thank God that the Lord’s promises are not limited by any number or fixed according to a specific time, but are constantly renewed for us, covering everything. “From six calamities he will rescue you, and in the seventh no harm will befall you” (Job: 5, 19). So there is no day when the Lord is not ready to help us. But we don’t immediately understand; even Peter did not trust the Lord when he began to drown in the fierce waves. But “Immediately Jesus reached out His hand and caught him” (Matt; 14, 31). It was enough for Peter, weakened by his struggle, to reach his hand out to Christ, and he was immediately saved. The Lord condescended to his fear and simply said to him: “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”
"And to this day the Lord constantly turns to us with that same question. We thought that we had a lot of faith, but what do our doubts, our complaints and our hesitation mean? Is it not that, like Peter, looking away from Christ, in Whom alone is our salvation, we dwell on what surrounds us and what bothers us, looking even into the future for everything that can frighten us.
“ ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’ This doubt is the source of all of our misery. Let us turn our gaze to Christ, and we will be firm, the waves of earthly concerns will not engulf us, and we will say with confidence: “We are hard pressed on every side, but not in despair, we are persecuted, but not abandoned” (2 Cor: 4: 8, 9).
For the Lewis connection, I will use the examples I quoted in October of last year in reference to a different Russian meditation about trusting God:
"In “God in the Dock” (I, 21), Lewis talks about two kinds of faith:
"(a) a settled intellectual assent. In that sense faith (or ‘belief’) in God hardly differs form faith in the uniformity of Nature or in the consciousness of other people…
"(b) a trust, or confidence, in the God whose existence is thus assented to. This involves an attitude of the will. It is more like our confidence in a friend.
"And in his essay, “Obstinacy in Belief” (essay 2 in “The World’s Last Night”), Lewis writes:
"The saying ‘Blessed are those that have not seen and have believed’ has nothing to do with our original assent to the Christian propositions. It was not addressed to a philosopher enquiring whether God exists. It was addressed to a man who already believed that, who already had long acquaintance with a particular Person, and evidence that that Person could do very odd things, and who then refused to believe one odd thing more, often predicted by that Person and vouched for by all his closest friends… It says, in effect, ‘You should have known me better.’ "
Dimitry
“Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. Love does not demand its own way. Love is not irritable, and it keeps no record of when it has been wronged. It is never glad about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. Love will last forever.” (1 Corinthians 13: 4-8)