The Longing (Dez)

I been reading a book about C.S Lewis, arguably one of the greatest and most influential Christian apologetic and philosopher of the twentieth century.

Below is the excerpt from a book which Lewis loved, "The Wind in the Willows".

'It's gone!' sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. 'So beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I never had it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it forever.'

Sometimes, that kind of emotion wells up in me as I thought about Charlene. The longing for the lost child, the lost parenthood, the lost dreams, the lost hope... and the accompanying intense pain make it seems that "I almost wish I never had it."

But me and Charlene's mummy do not believe in that, we know that that is our fickle mood trying to rationalise our pain away. Charlene is an important part of our lives. We cannot tear the memory and experience of her away from our fabric of selves; we will no longer be the same.

C.S. Lewis wrote:

"Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing (Christianity) looks very improbable; but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable... unless you teach your moods 'where to get off', you can never be a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion."

"When we exhort people to Faith as a virtue, to the settled intention of continuing to believe certain thigns, we are not exhorting them to fight against reason... If we wish to be rational, not now and then, but constantly, we must pray for the gift of Faith, for the power to go on believing not in the teeth of reason, but in the teeth of lust and terror and jealousy and boredom and indifference that which reason, authority, or experience, or all three, have once delivered to us for truth."

Indeed, the Longing (with a captial L) for God's word is the protection for me and Charlene's mummy's fickle mood. The pain is real... no doubt about the pain which all parents feel about the loss of a child. But we hold on to God's word, that He loves little children, and He has good plans to all who loved Him.

I pray that our Longing of our loving God be stronger than our longing for our lost children.