Did you ever fear that God's requirements of you were too much to ask?  That death to self was just a little too far?  There really HAS to be some part of your life that you can call "your own"?  That God keeps His hands off?  What if we were looking at that the wrong way, and that everything we keep for ourselves will eventually die?  Here's CS Lewis from a little-known essay:


"For some (nobody knows which) the Christian life will include much leisure, many occupations we naturally like.  But these will be received from God's hands.  In a perfect Christian they would be as much part of his "religion" his "service" as his hardest duties, and his feasts would be as Christian as his fasts.  What cannot be admitted - what must exist only as an undefeated but daily resisted enemy - is the idea of something that is "our own," some area in which we are to be "out of school" on which God has no claim.

For He claims all, because He is love and must bless.  He cannot bless us unless He has us.  When we try to keep within us an area that is our own, we try to keep an area of death.  Therefore, in love, He claims all.  There's no bargaining with Him."

from the essay, "A Slip of the Tongue,"  CS Lewis (The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses)

Praise God that He won't allow us even the smallest part of our own lives...it is out of His love for us that He does not.