The Weight of Glory

C. S. Lewis is a beautiful writer who has been blessed with a decisive and pondering heart. One thing that he is not afraid to address are his ideas, whether someone might agree with them or not. He states what he believes is true which is so ultimately refreshing.  

When I was younger, I loved to read the Nancy Drew mystery books. I remember one day in the summer when I relished the idea of getting the next in the series at the library. It seemed so exciting, especially not knowing what I was going to get myself into. Also, in past summers before high school, my brother and I would get all the neighborhood children into our yard and play some game, whether it was capture the flag, ghost in the graveyard, or hide-and-go-seek tag. Soon life changed a little and now that I am in college, the simple things that I long for are just the ability to sit at the dinner table and talk to my mom while she cooks dinner, read the Bible with my little sister each night before she ventures into dream land, or cozy up next to the fire at my home with a good book. All these are good memories to have. They reflect something that is beautiful. But if this is all that I long for at college, don’t I start desiring the past more than I do God? Though it is not wrong to be caught in what many call homesickness, what is wrong is when that is all that I think about. It is like what C. S. Lewis says, “These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.” Desires and wants are not bad, but I MUST ultimately desire the maker of desires, God himself. 

Over Christmas, my little sister wanted to surprise me so she decided to buy me presents with her own money. I was not expecting this because I did not even know she had money. Christmas morning came and in my stocking I found a pink snowflake stamp, some tiny precious moment chimes, and a colored ornament that I still have yet to figure out what it is. My sister Christy watched as I took them out one by one, carefully watching each expression of joy shared. “Do you like them sis?” She would ask. My hug and kiss told her I did. How beautiful children are. C. S. Lewis gives a great description when he says that “nothing is so obvious in a child - not in a conceited child, but a good child - as its great and undisguised pleasure in being praised...apparently what I have mistaken for humility had, all these years, prevented me from understanding what is in fact the humblest, the most childlike, the most creaturely of pleasures...the specific pleasure of an inferior: the pleasure a beast before a men, a child before its father, a pupil before its teacher, a creature before its Creator.” Let us not underestimate the beauty in children.