Faithfulness is consecration in overalls. It is the steady acceptance and performance of the common duty and immediate task without any reference to personal preferences--because it is there to be done, and so is a manifestation of the Will of God.... The fruits of the Spirit get less and less showy as we go on. Faithfulness means continuing quietly with the job we have been given, in the situation where we have been placed; not yielding to the restless desire for change. It means tending the lamp quietly for God without wondering how much longer it has got to go on. Steady, unsensational driving, taking good care of the car. A lot of the road to heaven has to be taken at 30 miles per hour.
Evelyn Underhill
All this preoccupation with your own imperfection is not humility, but an insidious form of spiritual pride. What do you expect to be? A saint? There are desperately few of them; and even they found their faults, which are the raw material of sanctity remember.
You know best when and how you fall into these various pitfalls. Try and control yourself when you see the temptation coming. Pull yourself up and make an act of contrition when you catch yourself doing any of the things.
Never allow yourself to be pessimistic about your own state. Look outward instead of inward; and when you are inclined to be depressed and think you are getting on badly, make an act of thanksgiving instead because others are getting on well.
The object of your salvation is God's Glory, not your happiness. So, be content to help, remaining yourself in the lowest place. Merge yourself in the great life of the Christian family. You have tied yourself up so tight in that accursed individualism of yours--the source of all your difficulties--that it is a marvel you can breathe at all.
The series of events which were worked out to their inevitable end in Holy Week sum up and express the deepest secrets of the relation of God to men. That means, of course, that Christianity can never be merely a pleasant or consoling religion. It is a stern business. It is concerned with the salvation through sacrifice and love of a world in which evil and cruelty are rampant. Its supreme symbol is the Crucifix--the total and loving self-giving of man to the redeeming purposes of God.
Because we are all the children of God, we all have our part to play in God's redemptive plan; and the Church consists of those souls who have accepted this obligation, with all that it costs. Its members are all required to live, each in their own way, through the sufferings and self-abandonment of the Cross, as the only real contribution which they can make to the redemption of the world. Christians, like their Master, must be ready to accept the worst that evil and cruelty can do to them, and vanquish it by the power of love.
You remember the noble figure of Faithful in [John Bunyan's] Pilgrim's Progress, Christian's best friend. How he started from the City of Destruction some time after Christian, but soon passed him on the road because he never thought it necessary to linger, to ask for explanations or worry about dangers. He just plodded steadily on. Faithful is the least self-occupied of all the pilgrims. We hear nothing about his burden or fatigue or difficulty or the poor state of the road. Christian makes a good deal of the Valley of Humiliation, tells us about how horrible it was and feels it very remarkable that he ever got through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. There is none of that in Faithful. He is not thinking about saving his soul. He is thinking about God. And so he goes in sunshine all the way.