As I have often shared in the past, especially through July and August, my summer at Muskoka Bible Centre (a.k.a. MBC) on Mary Lake in the Muskoka region of Central Ontario offers countless opportunities to reconnect with friends I only see mid May through October. Visits on the deck behind the Hub, thought-provoking conversations around a fire pit or over coffee or tea, meals around the kitchen table, or simply hanging out on your own deck are a constant throughout the summer months. Yes, we do fight mosquitoes and black flies, and yes, we especially, do battle the neighbourhood groundhog who considers our flower garden the source of his or her personal breakfast, lunch and dinner. But perhaps on a level of greater importance, my months at MBC offer an opportunity to reflect on where I am at in my spiritual life, an opportunity for introspection that can be as deep or as shallow as I choose to make it.
Admittedly, sitting under the ministry and teaching of scholars who “tell it like it is” can be rather sobering. One such speaker peppered his morning sessions with humour, but not at the expense of teaching the meaning behind a particular scripture passage, as well as teaching how we should apply it to our lives. Challenges such as “Jesus doesn’t just save us from our sin. He saves us for His service;” and, “Passive judgement is God handing us over to the very thing we think will bring us pleasure and we end up with nothing;” and a reference to Kevin De Young who has stated that, “We walk into the future in God-glorifying confidence, not because the future is known to us but because it is known to God…We can stop pleading with Him to show us the future, and start living and obeying like we are confident that He holds the future.”
Like I said, rather sobering. Having our spiritual lives challenged will undoubtedly have an affect on our spiritual growth: either we choose to grow or we 
choose to remain stagnant. There’s no fence-sitting! But who likes to be told they are doing something contrary to God’s will and plan for their life? Who likes to be reminded that God has a purpose for each of us and that purpose and plan may not fall under the one we have made and are determined to follow?
With that thought in mind, C. S. Lewis states in Mere Christianity:*
Of course we never wanted, and never asked, to be made into the sort of creatures He is going to make us into. But the question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us. He is the inventor, we are only the machine. He is the painter, we are only the picture. How should we know what He means us to be like?…We may be content to remain what we call “ordinary people”: but He is determined to carry out a quite different plan. To shrink back from that plan is not humility; it is laziness and cowardice. To submit to it is not conceit or megalomania [self-importance]; it is obedience.
By borrowing a parable from George MacDonald, Lewis goes further in helping us understand and digest how and why God intends to accomplish His purpose and plan for our lives.
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.
*(C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2001), pp. 204–205.
There are two kinds of people:
those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’
and those to whom God says, ‘All right, then, have it your way.’
C. S. Lewis
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