Acknowledging need

"It is easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realise for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us. Surely we must have a little - however little - native luminosity? Surely we can't be quite creatures?
"For this tangled absurdity of a Need, even a Need-love, which never fully acknowledges its own neediness, Grace substitutes a full, childlike and delighted acceptance of our Need, a joy in total dependence. We become 'jolly beggars.' The good man is sorry for the sins which have increased his Need. He is not entirely sorry for the fresh Need they have produced. And he is not sorry at all for the innocent Need that is inherent in his creaturely condition. For all the time this illusion to which nature clings as her last treasure, this pretence that we have anything of our own or could for one hour retain by our own strength any goodness that God may pour into us, has kept us from being happy. We have been like bathers who want to keep their feet - or one foot - or one toe - on the bottom, when to lose that foothold would be to surrender themselves to a glorious tumble in the surf. The consequences of parting with our last claim to intrinsic freedom, power, or worth, are real freedom, power and worth, really ours just because God gives them and because we know them to be (in another sense) not 'ours.'" - C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

This is not the way I naturally think, and I don't think it's the way most other people think either.We are ashamed of our Need, even our Need for God; we wish to be independent beings, possessing something utterly our own which we can then give to God and to other people. In fact, we don't want to admit that we are dependent on God, not just because of our sin, but because we are His creatures, the things He has made and whose life He sustains. I love the analogy in the first paragraph above: we want to have some light of our own, to shine bright with the goodness of our own being, instead of simply reflecting the light of God. But since we are His creatures, even if light did shine forth directly from us, it would still be His light that He put within us in the first place.There is nothing we can offer Him that He did not give to us, and because we are fallen we tend to need His help and encouragement even in that act of giving. And that is hard to accept, so I tend to fight it - I try to prove to myself, through continued efforts to be perfect, through the accumulated praises of people around me, through my own self-assessment in every situation, that I am a being who can live without Need and give freely of what is inherently my own to God and others: in other words, that I am a being like God in that I am my own self-sufficient person characterized by Gift-love rather than by Need-love.

But of course this is not true! So the fight becomes a lesson in failure and discouragement, or in self-righteousness and pride, depending on how the battles of the moment are progressing. In either case, there is no true delight, freedom, or consciousness of value. How could there be, when I am trying to live outside the constraints of reality? As Lewis wrote above, the false belief that we are self-sufficient, independent beings is what bars us from experiencing happiness. It imprisons us in continual striving for inherent personal perfection, in lies (believed in the heart if not spoken), in competition even with those we love the most, in the desperate fortress of pride faced with defeat. Having proclaimed to ourselves that we are Need-less - without Need of any sort, and particularly without that Need of God that infiltrates our whole being - we begin to feel that we are needless - meaningless beings without any greater purpose or worth. The One whom we need even to be truly ourselves is the same One who has made us able to meet the needs of people around us, given us a purpose and a meaning for our lives, and thus bestowed upon us greater worth than we could have ever made for ourselves. The One before whom we are utterly powerless, and upon whom we are dependent for life itself, gives to us His power, that we might live by His strength and do greater things that we could ever have imagined for ourselves. And the One who is a fountain of joy and love, apart from whom we are dark and hate-filled little creatures, will, if we will let Him, cause that fountain to spring up in glory within our very hearts, giving to us that which we could never earn or make for ourselves, but in the act of giving making it truly ours in Him.