Molly’s Words
This week, we walked in the footsteps of C.S. Lewis — the very place he’d been at Oxford’s Magdalen College before writing these words:
You must picture me alone in that room in 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 Trinity Term 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 of England.
from his memoir Surprised by Joy
I so admire how Lewis seemed to WRESTLE with his faith. He also wrote of a walk with friends (like Tolkien!) along a nearby path that took hours, ending at 3AM. The conversation, he says, started with metaphor and myth … then “continued on Christianity: a good long satisfying talk in which I learned a lot.”
The Wildmans went on the same walk. (Ours ended just before dinner, with apple juice, donuts, tea, and mocha.)
I wonder: Why do we yearn to walk the worn path of history’s greats?
The TEMPTATION is that we want to BE great, isn’t it? Yes, I want to BE great like C.S. Lewis. To write a classic series of books. To inspire generations. To come to terms with faith. To make a walk famous simply because I walked there.
I so want all this, for this year away to be awesome — to, somehow, BE great for all time. For us and for history.
Wow. That seems super misguided, a good bit off-the-mark.
So what is the right mark? What is the right path, the right walk for us — generally, and for this year? What SHOULD we want for our time away?
I spoke with an elderly woman at church last Sunday. Her name is Molly. As I shared some of these thoughts about our year away, she held my hand close – likely because she’s blind.
She told me there are Holy plans for this year of ours.
So — what do we do with that?
What do you DO with that old woman’s prophesy? Really, it seems to me, don’t you do nothing? After all the doing is not up to you! All you “do” is meditate on that promise, let it fill you, and then believe in it, on it, with it. In the process, you will live it out, in His strength and with His direction, and in technicolor.
Thanks for sharing the journey with us, and so beautifully, too. Likely you can’t see all the richness while you’re in it, and I know there are still the grinds of life, but really, from the standpoint of suburban routine over here, wow, it sure does seem rich and wild and firehose-like…