Faith & C.S. Lewis

I'm currently reading a biography about C.S. Lewis and was surprised to read about his very deep struggles in his early life in regards to his faith. He was a devoted Athiest until he was 30 years old! At one point he wrote in a letter, regarding his life-threatening ordeals in World War 1, "not once did I sink so low as to go on my knees and pray." It was out of the question, he thought himself to be far too intelligent and 'logical' to accept the "myth of Christianity".

But within his heart there was a daily struggle between his rational, logical self and his imaginative, creative self. At any given time he could be cold and clinical and at the same time caught up in a world of fairies and mythical creatures. At times he thought he would go crazy because the two sides of himself were obviously in contention with each other. There was no possible way to bring them together. It was impossible.

But Jesus said once that "all things are possible for God". At age 30 Lewis became a Christian, and on the night where he had his conversion experience he later wrote,

"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 the 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 England."Jesus said that one of the greatest values that we should have in life is to "love the LORD your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength".

Although C.S. Lewis was the most 'reluctant' convert in all of England, he was now set free to love God with all of his heart and all of his head. He would go on to write the Narnia series, where his creative side was allowed to roam free - where he could write about talking animals, wicked witches, and a magical wardrobe. But he could also write books like Mere Christianity where he gave logical, straightforward reasoning for belief in Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God. It seems that the frustration he once had, between his 'two sides', had now been wonderfully united in a special way, and it led him to produce some of the most powerful Christian works in the world. And the uniting factor was - Jesus.