Remember this and take courage;
    take it to heart, you rebels.
Remember the prior things—from long ago;
    I am God, and there’s no other.
I am God! There’s none like me,
     who tells the end at the beginning,
    from ancient times things not yet done,
    saying, “My plan will stand;
    all that I decide I will do…” – Isaiah 46:8-10

Saturday afternoon I took some time to prepare for a Sunday school class I’m scheduled to teach this morning. It’s a kind of introduction to C.S. Lewis, but more along the lines of “How C.S. Lewis has impacted me.”

Part of my prep was to sort through our C.S. Lewis book collection. It’s quite extensive but there are still gaping holes (there are around 40 books in this box, either by or about C.S. Lewis).

One of the books – The Four Loves – I remember teaching in our “Kaleidoscope” Sunday school class at Trinity in Pensacola; it still has my notes from the late 80’s. But better than the notes is the bookmark I found in there, it’s a drawing Andrew did on the back of a stewardship commitment card while sitting in church with me January of 1985.

Here it is. It’s a train heading from church back to our house. He was two and a half years old!

The drawing reminds me of why I enjoy reading Lewis so much. He’s always on the way somewhere. His thought processes are like that train, chugging along, very much aware that he does not have the complete picture but that there are clues along the way.

Contrast this with so much of the “closed loop” dogma dished out by so many so-called Christian thinkers, people with all the answers and no capacity for or interest in learning. Personally I realize I am wrong a good deal of the time, and I know there is still so much for me to understand – and, then, still more questions.

One of my favorite Lewis ideas is that the hope or the yearning we have for something is good evidence that “the thing” exists. A thirsty person thirsts for water because there is such a thing as water; an abandoned infant cries for his/her mother because there is such a thing as a mother; a prisoner craves freedom because freedom is real; someone in a loveless relationship yearns for love because love is not make-believe; the soul owns a longing for God – and for the beauty that is only hinted at in music and art – because God is real, and so is beauty… and in a sense, we already know.

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.

C.S. Lewis

Like the four-year-old who was heard to whisper to her newborn infant brother, “Tell me all about God… I am beginning to forget.”

So my brain this morning – along with my heart, they are difficult to separate – is both committed to the C.S. Lewis level of curiosity and to the little girl’s approach too. I want to learn all there is to know… and at the same time I feel this need to be still, to meditate, to be quiet and to remember.

With the help of the God “who tells the end at the beginning, from ancient times things not yet done” (Isaiah 46:10). – DEREK