C.S. Lewis got into a tangle about prayer when he was a kid.  He writes about it in Surprised by Joy.  He got the idea he had to achieve some special mental state he called a realization, which he never quite did.  It became frustrating enough he gave up on prayer.

I’ve never admitted this before, but between ourselves that passage made me lose some respect for Lewis.  It sounded like the sort of stupid thing done for stupid reasons that is always happening in a Russian novel.

Then two weeks ago my daughter had a question during our father-daughter interview.  She said she was confused about what repentance was.

That brought me back.  When I was young, I couldn’t figure out what repentance was.  It was a tangle.  A Sunday School teacher who I respected, or a Seminary teacher who I knew knew what they were talking about, or a Bishop, would say, ‘is repentance just changing what you are doing?”  Answer: no.  Well, what else was it then?  They never said in a way that I could understand.  I eventually decided that repentance meant achieving some kind of special mental state of penitence which I had somehow never experienced.

I didn’t give up on repentance completely, heaven be thanked, but I did run into a lot of unneeded knots and frustration.

Repentance is easy to understand, I told my daughter.  It’s three things:

1.  Deciding that you are less than you should be in some way.
2. Deciding to fix it.
3. Deciding you can’t fix it on your own and asking for help.  At minimum from the Father and the Son.

That is all.