“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” C.S. Lewis
“You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term (“summer”) of 1929 I gave in and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England” (Surprised By Joy).
Those words speak to how hard C.S. Lewis, Professor of English Literature at Oxford University until 1954, fought to convince himself there was no God. Perhaps you know him as the author of Mere Christianity or The Chronicles of Narnia, two of his most famous writings. Disillusioned that God did not heal his mother from cancer, Lewis, age 10, left his childhood faith to throw himself into the defense of rationalism/atheism. That belief was reinforced when years later, as a student at Oxford, he found himself deeply troubled by suffering in the world, questioning how a loving God could allow such evil. Ironically, his firm belief in the nonexistence of God made him rethink some of his position’s inconsistencies. After years of intellectual struggle, Lewis found faith to be rational. Not only did he find factors such as the beauty of nature and art, joy, and even people undermined the foundation of his atheism, he also was able to see evil and suffering as an argument for God and Christianity, not for atheism.
In Mere Christianity, Lewis wrote: “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. Just how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? … Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense. Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.” It’s little wonder that many consider C.S. Lewis to be the greatest Christian apologist of the 20th century. Sorrow entered Lewis’s life again when Joy, his wife of only three years, died from cancer at the age of 45. Lewis was left to face the problem of grief and unanswered prayer. He wrote that “even after all hope was gone, even on the last night before her death, there were patins of bright gold. Two of the last things she said were ‘You have made ne happy’ and ‘I am at peace with God.’”
I am encouraged by Lewis who boldly admitted the struggle of his faith but later found blessings amongst troubles. The author wrote that he was grateful for the miraculous cure for his wife’s first bout with cancer and that God granted him two more years with her before she died. Still, in Mere Christianity he wrote this: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Can anyone say it better?