Sometimes
life is what happens to us when we are planning to do something else. Shortly
before his nineteenth birthday C. S. Lewis was drafted and found himself
billeted at Keble College, where he found himself sharing a room with Paddy
Moore. The two young men promised each other that if either died, the surviving
one would take care of the parent of the one who died. Lewis was wounded and returned to England for
recuperation. Paddy Moore was not so
lucky but was killed in action.
At
the end of the war Lewis returned to Oxford to continue his education. Lewis’s brother Warren writes that C. S.
Lewis felt a “duty of keeping some war-time promise made to Paddy Moore” and as
a result took on what was going to be a life-long association with Paddy’s
querulous and demanding mother. Warren
wrote of Paddy Moore’s mother that she “interfered constantly with his (C. S.
Lewis) work, and imposed upon him a heavy burden of minor domestic tasks. In twenty years I never saw a book in her
hands; her conversation was chiefly about herself, and was otherwise a matter
of ill-informed dogmatism: her mind was of a type that he found barely
tolerable elsewhere.” Lewis faithfully
maintained his relationship with Paddy Moore’s mother until her death some
thirty years later.
What
is amazing is everything else that C. S. Lewis accomplished while under the
stress of living in a household dominated by this old tyrant. He was a
voracious reader and creative thinker who left an indelible impression on his
peers and on generations to come. C.S.
Lewis is one of the most prolific Christian authors of the twentieth century. In one of his books during World War II,
Lewis tells his readers that the crisis caused by the war shouldn’t hamper them
from meeting the more important challenges of life.
There
will always be a crisis of some sort. Stress
goes away for a while, then changes its coat and comes back again in another
guise. Life is what you make of it where
you are. In the midst of everything C.S.
Lewis grew a habit of steady prayer and scripture reading and developed a
special fondness for the Book of Psalms.
As his books became popular he prospered and extended his charities to a
wide variety of societies and needy individuals. He was a man whose gaze was so firmly on the
heavenly city that the hindrances on the immediate horizon faded in
importance. Rather than being quelled by
his domestic circumstances, C.S. Lewis thrived and blessed us all.
If
we wait for circumstances to change before we do the things that we want to do we
will have to wait forever. Like C.S.
Lewis, instead of being constrained by the crises and stress of everyday life,
we face the challenge of stepping forward, right where we are, to meet God’s
deeper calling on our lives.
