Blessed and Wretched

"...That was what people objected to about Christ during His life on earth:
He seemed to attract 'such awful people.' That is what people still object to,
and always will. Do you not see why? Christ said, 'Blessed are the poor'....
If you have sound nerves and intelligence and health and popularity and a good
upbringing, you are likely to be quite satisfied with your character as it is...
"It is very different for the nasty people -- the little, low, timid,
warped, thin-blooded, lonely people, or the passionate, sensual, unbalanced
people. If they make any attempt at goodness at all, they learn, in double
quick time, that they need help. It is Christ or nothing for them. It is
taking up the cross and following -- or else despair. They are the lost sheep;
He came specially to find them. They are (in one very real and terrible sense)
the 'poor': He blessed them. They are the 'awful set' He goes about with --
and, of course, the Pharisees say still, as they said from the first, 'If there
were anything in Christianity, those people would not be Christians.'
"There is either warning or encouragement here for every one of us. If you
are a nice person -- if virtue comes easily to you -- beware! Much is expected
from those to whom much is given. If you mistake for your own merits what are
really God's gifts to you through nature, and if you are contented with simply
being nice, you are still a rebel: and all those gifts will only make your fall
more terrible, your corruption more complicated, your bad example more
disastrous. The Devil was an archangel once; his natural gifts were as far
above yours as yours are above those of a chimpanzee.
"But if you are a poor creature -- poisoned by a wretched upbringing in
some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels -- saddled, by no
choice of your own, with some loathsome sexual perversion -- nagged day in and
day out by an inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best friends -- do
not despair. He knows all about it. You are one of the poor whom He blessed.
He knows what a wretched machine you are trying to drive. Keep on. Do what you
can. One day (perhaps in another world, but perhaps far sooner than that) he
will fling it on the scrapheap and give you a new one. And then you may
astonish us all -- not least yourself: for you have learned your driving in a
hard school. (Some of the last will be first and some of the first will be
last.)" -- Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis