The intercom in the third grade classroom crackles the words, “The President has been shot.” Several desks
over, a girl laughs loud, her emotional reaction to something she doesn't understand. We are eight, and for many a new reality may be settling
in.
Bad. Things. Really. Happen.
The laughing girl is now hysterically crying. The world
tilts. Camelot burns.
I read recently that when boomers are asked where they were
on the day President John F. Kennedy was shot, we most often respond, “In school.” A whole
generation of us sat in oak desks pouring over new math and diagramming
sentences unsuspecting the news hurling toward us would mark that day as one of
the most memorable in our lifetime.
In the next few days, we’d watch grainy black and white
footage of a president slumping over onto the lap of his wife, his blood
staining what we were told was a pink Chanel suit. We didn’t have color television
at our house, so we’d have to take the announcer’s word for it. We’d witness a
son’s last salute as the hearse rolls by, and even though we'd only spent eight years on the planet, my classmates and
I would feel the loss as the whole world mourned. I’d take out my little tea
set made to look just like the one First Lady Jackie used, and wonder what
would happen to us all. What would happen to our country?
On the same day an American President is struck down, across
an ocean, another man dies. The events in Dallas eclipse his demise, and the
death of Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis, is buried deep in the news.
Seventeen years later, as a woman edging toward a cliff of
despair after years of struggling, I crack open Mere Christianity, and within its pages find hope at last.
More than any other book except the Bible, this book and others by C.S. Lewis
have guided my spiritual journey.
As the fiftieth anniversary of the death of President John
F. Kennedy draws near on November 22, we will hear much about that tragic day
in Dallas.
I do not remember the death of C.S. Lewis, and I expect the
anniversary of his death will pass with far less fanfare than that of Kennedy’s.
But his life has had a tremendous impact on our world. It’s said that
D.L. Moody helped reduce the population of hell by 1,000,000 souls. I wonder
how many C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity has diverted from a dark destiny. Only
God knows.
My raggedy copy of Mere Christianity has a broken spine. When
opened, it splits to a chapter entitled, "Hope"—the four pages most read and underlined in the whole volume. Hope is what I desperately lacked, and hope is
what I found so many years ago:
“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. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the
universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it,
but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If this is so, I must take
care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly
blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of
which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in
myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death;
I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main
object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the
same.”
What I didn’t know at eight years old when it seemed life
was unraveling, and I was so fearful about the nation, is that God had another
country for me—one which could not be touched by an assassin’s bullet.
C.S. Lewis helped point me to that country.
On November 22, I’ll remember again those moments in a third
grade classroom and the assassination of a President, but I’ll be forever
grateful for the work of one man who helped me know my true citizenship.
“But our citizenship is in heaven. And we
eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that
enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly
bodies so that they will be like his glorious body” (Ephesians 3:20-21).