Yours, Jack: A look into the life of C.S. Lewis

Today, I ran across a C.S. Lewis book called, “Yours, Jack.” I read a few pages and decided I would write about C.S. Lewis, his life, his struggles and his victories in Christ. As I continue to research and read about his accomplishments and family life, I am noticing how much he was like each of us in his everyday struggles. I think we often tend to put “famous” people up on pedestals and think that they didn't have the same kind of faults that we do, but that is very far from the truth. God uses average people who love God to impact many more.

Clive Staples Lewis (C.S. Lewis) was born on November 29, 1898 in Belfast, Ireland. Apparently, at the age of four, shortly after his dog Jacksie was killed by a car, he announced that his name was now Jacksie. At first, he would answer to no other name, but later accepted Jack, the name by which he was known to friends and family for the rest of his life.

Lewis' mother died from cancer when he was about 9 or 10 years old which must have planted doubt in him related to spiritual matters especially to whether God was good or evil.

As a boy, Lewis had a fascination with anthropomorphic animals, falling in love with Beatrix Potter's stories and often writing and illustrating his own animal stories. He and his brother Warnie together created the world of Boxen, inhabited and run by animals. Lewis loved to read; and, as his father's house was filled with books, he felt that finding a book to read was as easy as walking into a field and "finding a new blade of grass".

As a teenager, he was wonder-struck by the songs and legends of what he called Northernness, the ancient literature of Scandinavia preserved in the Icelandic sagas intensified an inner longing he later called "joy". He also grew to love nature; its beauty reminded him of the stories of the North, and the stories of the North reminded him of the beauties of nature. His teenage writings moved away from the tales of Boxen, and he began using different art forms (epic poetry and opera) to try to capture his new-found interest in Norse mythology and the natural world.

In 1917, Lewis left his studies to volunteer in the British Army. During World War I, he was commissioned into the Third Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry. Lewis arrived at the front line in the Somme Valley in France on his nineteenth birthday, and experienced trench warfare.

On 15 April 1918, Lewis was wounded and two of his colleagues were killed by a British shell falling short of its target.Lewis suffered from depression and homesickness during his convalescence. Upon his recovery in October, he was assigned to duty in Andover, England. He was demobilized(the military force stood down) in December 1918, and soon returned to his studies.

J.R.R. Tolkien whom he(Lewis) seems to have met for the first time on 11 May 1926, were good friends at Oxford University. Tolkien and others are credited with being an influence on Lewis to turn to Christianity. C.S. Lewis was baptized at birth, but fell away during his young adult years becoming an atheist at age 15, though he later described his young self as being paradoxically "very angry with God for not existing." He became a theist in 1929 before becoming a Christian. God used his Christian friend(s) as well as material likeThe Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton. He fought greatly up to the moment of his conversion, noting that he was brought into Christianity like a prodigal, "kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape."He described his last struggle in Surprised by Joy:

“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.”

C. S. Lewis spent a good portion of each day corresponding with people via handwritten letters. Over his lifetime he wrote thousands of letters in which he offered his friends and acquaintances advice on the Christian life, giving away a bit of himself to each of these correspondents as he signed his notes with a heartfelt and familiar, "yours, Jack."

In Lewis's later life, he corresponded with and later met Joy Davidson Gresham, an American writer of Jewish background, a former Communist, and a convert from atheism to Christianity. She had been married once before to William Gresham and had two boys from that marriage. After a troubling marriage and her conversion to Christianity, they divorced.

Davidman published her best known work,”Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments in 1954 with a preface by C.S. Lewis. Lewis had been an influence on her work and conversion and became her second husband (he was 57),after her permanent relocation to England in 1956. Four years later, Joy died at the young age of 45 due to secondary bone cancer.

C.S. Lewis died on November 22, 1963 at the age of 64 in Oxford, England the same day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_Davidman

http://www.harpercollins.com/browseinside/index.aspx?isbn13=9780061240591

http://www.rapidnet.com/~jbeard/bdm/exposes/lewis/cs-lewis.htm

Disclaimer: I don't necessarily agree with everything on these websites or that all the info on them is factual