George MacDonald wrote a prayer for every day of the year in Diary of an Old Soul in 1880. His entry for July 16th begins:
“The house is not for me—it is for him.
His royal thoughts require many a stair,
Many a tower, many an outlook fair
Of which I have no thought.”
C.S. Lewis, who was greatly impacted by MacDonald, enlarged upon George’s analogy in Mere Christianity, “Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, you understand what he is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew these jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently, he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and doesn’t 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 up 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. You see, he intends to come and live in it himself.”
When I first read C.S. Lewis’ words as a new convert, his analogy hit home. As Christ was taking residence in my life, I began to realize that he intended a far different dwelling than the one I had envisioned for myself. A prayer that Augustine of Hippo (354-430) wrote in Confessions, his spiritual autobiography, is a prayer for Christ to indwell every room in our hearts: