I have been continuing with Augustine's Confessions. Unsuprisingly, there is a lot about the tension between how he was living and how he should have been living. For most of us, at times, that's life - but how important it is, both individually and communally, to struggle with that tension.
In one section he states it particularly strongly. He writes: "In this warfare I was on both sides, but I took the part of that which I approved in myself rather than the part of that which I disapproved. For my true self was no longer on the side of which I disapproved, since to a great extent I was now its reluctant victim rather than its willing tool. Yet it was by my own doing that habit had become so potent an enemy, because it was by my own will that I had reached the state in which I no longer wished to stay."
We all end up there sometimes - but the Good News is that, even then, God is alongside us, helping to pull us out of what the psalmist calls the "miry clay" or "deadly quicksand" (Psalm 40:2).
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