For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Ephesians 2:10

Sunday was a lot to process. All good, but a lot; enough to fuel several posts. Church in the morning was most excellent, and I will likely write later in response to Rebekah’s message (we are going through The Fruit of the Spirit). Then we took a field trip over to Raleigh with friends for a matinee performance at the theater followed by an amazing dinner.

Further Up & Further In:

I will start with the afternoon, when we enjoyed Max McLean’s stellar one man C.S. Lewis show, “Further Up & Further In.” McLean’s performance was masterful and his content – all taken directly from Lewis’s writings – pitch perfect.

As a writer – as a Christian thinker – Lewis is one of my biggest influences. He has the genius to communicate important and complex truths in a way that people understand; he introduces Oxford and Cambridge post-doctorate thinking to community college brains; he makes deep intellectual ideas assessable. He makes reason, well, so reasonable.

Reading Lewis makes regular people feel smart.

This event was especially timely for me because I am deeply concerned about our public conversations around faith. McLean reminds me of how compelling it can be to simply share our own story. And this is where Sunday morning (in church) and Sunday afternoon (at the Performing Arts Center) come together so well: I do not have to offer intellectual proofs for God, but I am called to bear fruit, and the fruit – the evidence – of God’s goodness and love and hope and more tells the story.

To tell the truth about the Gospel of Love simply by being.

C.S. Lewis told the truth via being the intellectual giant that he was. Max McLean is telling the good news via his skills as an actor and storyteller. Somebody else will share the gospel as they go about their work as an engineer, or a construction worker, or a teacher, or a stay-at-home parent, or a pilot.

The point of the C. S. Lewis play was not that we must be “Lewis level persuasive” in our intellectual arguments, but that we are persuasive in terms of speaking the truth via the way we live out our own calling in life…

…that we are persuasive in authenticity. Because the truth is that because I am saved by grace then I must therefore live in grace, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).

Our opportunity, to live grace charged lives authentically; on the stage of our everyday lives – DEREK