The New Bereans

“…hope that is seen is not hope.”  -Romans 8:24b

Every day it is there, lurking behind every turn of a corner, hiding under every spoken syllable I hear, whispering with every breath of a shifting wind.  Behind the promise of every rainbow, and at the flailing capitulation of every weary, summer spent leaf.  Every time an exultant and radiant sun erupts against the atmospheric, crenellating wave of a blackened storm front.  Every conversation, every glance to the distant side, every time my daughter raises her arms in expectation of my lifting her into my embrace, when I feel, yet again, awkward in a social setting, and with my insatiable desire to direct even the most mundane of every single conversation I have in life toward something deeper and more meaningful.  Whenever I see the sunlight reflect off of my wife’s beautiful hair, and every time she looks at me with her deep love, even when she asks me what I am thinking, and love compels me to put my morass of complicated thoughts into a tangible linear string of verbal sense.  If I read a news article, or hear some lament, it is always there…

It is an insatiable, ravenous, all consuming, and unrelenting hope, and the things which I do see are constantly reminding me of its presence echoing beyond every instance.  All these things and many more are reminding me, by the very nature of how they make me see past them, to something I cannot explain with words, something that I desire with such a hunger that there is no simile with which to describe it.  For if I was to put it into words by analogy or metaphor that would be to limit it.  To attempt to quantify the depth of, weight of, width of, or consistency of this desire would also limit it, or place bookends on it, if you will.

It is this hope, in that which none of the things I can visually comprehend are capable of satiating, that can only be matched by what will eventually satisfy that hope.  Just as the hope within me cannot be measured, quantified, or rationalized, neither can that which I am hoping in.  For whom I am hoping in is the immeasurable, infinite, immense, and eternal. He that is so far beyond even the vastness of our known universe, which is nearly irrational to our minds in its own scope, yet His hand spans it with ease.

And yet, beyond all imagining, that inexhaustible, maddening-to-comprehend vastness condensed Himself into an infinitesimal and displayed to all history, humanity, and creation just how vast he really was on a simple, unimportant, dusty, sun-baked hill, in an annoying, back-water nuisance of a Province with nails in His hands and his blood splashed all over the place.

It is Him that I hope for; it is His eternal presence, and the radiance of who He is…

Clive Staples Lewis

As soon as I was able to crack the spine of a book with legitimacy and authority, based upon the virtue of the fact that I was going to imbibe the words contained within it, I found myself consuming, “The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.”  My mother must have put me on phonic steroids when I wasn’t looking, because I remember reading it when I was between kindergarten and 1st grade.  My mother was always faithful to make sure I had plenty to read and for her persistence, I am eternally grateful.

In my last year of High School, I became gripped with a terrifying doubt about the validity of Christianity.   Post modern reasoning wormed its way into my brain and began to create a mash of my faith.   I do not remember how many nights I wept while my mind raced through all the maddening scenarios that would occur in my life should I choose to disbelieve.  Sleep, in those days, was like a long distance relationship to me, and I could hardly afford a calling card.  Most of the tears I cried flowed from fear and loneliness while the nature of my doubts were not really relatable to anyone I knew.  These doubts were so ghastly to me; in fact, I hesitated to talk to anyone about it for fear that I would infect them with the same plague that dominated my every waking thought.  If I ever did, God please forgive me.

Eventually, by God’s grace, I was granted the gift of faith and all my doubts washed away, but that is jumping ahead a bit.  Before the gift was granted however, my weak colander of faith was filled over and over with the thoughts and musings of C.S. Lewis.   He was not able to answer all of my questions, but many of the things he said in Pilgrims Regress, Mere Christianity, and Surprised by Joy kept me tethered and sane.  Every time I began to slip into the terrors of my doubts I would remember something he said which would counteract my dark brooding.

If I am granted the privilege of meeting him in the after, I think it will be difficult for me to respect British propriety, for I suspect I will hug the wind from his lungs.  He was a Father who nurtured me into true faith.  As he would have worded it in: “The Great Divorce,” he blew on the little glimmer of a coal within my soul till the heat of life began to spark.  I have had many teachers in my life, but very few Fathers (1 Cor 4:15).  I suspect that his writing, combined with my Grandmother’s prayers, and the passion my Mother instilled within me for the written word, (God’s sovereignty notwithstanding) granted me the right environment where God eventually flooded my doubts with the light of Hebrews 11:1.

As a belated thanksgiving post, I offer gratitude up to the Father of Lights, who has blessed me over and over again with the writings of this powerful thinker.  I was heavily reminded about it all as I read “The Great Divorce” last weekend in one interupted sitting and was gripped all over again and lead to weep in a new way because of his writing.  During this second foray into his real solid land I was confronted by the depth of my sin, and overwhelmed by the Grace of Jesus Christ.  These tears were much more welcome, praise be to God, who is able to keep me from falling.