students of jesus

On the same day John F. Kennedy’s assassination shocked the world, Clive Staples Lewis quietly slipped out life's back door and proceeded farther up and farther into Aslan’s country. In fact, November 22^nd 2013 is the fiftieth anniversary of the deaths of three significant 20^th Century men: JFK, Lewis, and Aldous Huxley (Brave New World). If there were a waiting room somewhere in the afterlife, it would have been a fascinating place that day.

Among these 30 Thankful Days I hope you will permit me an appreciation of C.S. Lewis, my first mentor in following Jesus.

I had been a high-school evangelical for three years when someone handed me a collection of Lewis’ essays, God in the Dock. They changed my life. He's more than the Narnia movie guy: if you have never read C.S. Lewis, you have missed one of God’s great gifts to the church in the last hundred years. God in the Dock was the most formative work of Lewis for me because it captured my heart and my attention. From the Dock I went on to discover the reality of the spiritual realm in The Screwtape Letters, the foolishness of valuing ideas merely because they seem new (The Abolition of Man), and yes, the delight of an extended story of other worlds where Jesus is also on the move. Forty-plus years later, Lewis is my constant companion.

Lewis taught me both the delight and the challenge of following Jesus. He was the Father’s emissary in the process of renewing my mind, and he is still my conversational partner and brother in Christ. The facts of his life are remarkable: losing his mother at an early age, a distant but decent father, the horrors of trench warfare in World War I, an alcoholic brother, an mysterious woman who became something of a shackle in his life, and the unexpected joy of finding Christian love late in his life. And then there's the whole international-fame and selling 50-million books thing. For all of his intellect and fame, he experienced many of the same problems we all face.

The trusted voice of Lewis lingers in my memory as fresh as morning coffee, and from my perch in the Kentucky countryside I’m still on the lookout for a fawn, with an umbrella, carrying parcels.