From the Book “C.S. Lewis, The Man and His Message”:
Gilbert Meilanender wrote well of Lewis in the fall 1998 issue of First Things, saying, “Every choice counts. Every choice contributes to determining what we ultimately love.”9
C.S. Lewis learned and concluded, as do all serious disciples that when one gets involved with God, the loving Tutor doesn’t stop halfway through. . . . When I was a child I often had a toothache, and I knew that if I went to my mother, she would give me something that would deaden the pain for the night and let me get some sleep. But I did not go to my mother—at least, not till the pain became very bad. And the reason that I did not go was this. I did not doubt that she would give me an aspirin for that night and let me get to sleep. But I knew she would also do something else. I knew she would take me to the dentist the next morning . . . and I knew those dentists; . . . Our Lord is like the dentists. . . Dozens of people go to Him to be cured of one particular sin which they are ashamed of. . . . Well, He will cure it all right: but he will not stop there. That may be all you asked; but if once you call Him in He will give you the full treatment.10
There is someone else of whom Lewis reminds us: the Tempter, who is likewise concerned with the little things in our daily lives: “It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards, if cards can do the trick. Indeed, the safest track to hell is the gradual one—a gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”11
Discipleship is likewise a precious but incremental process, as Lewis observed, in which “the Christian, trying to treat everyone one kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on—including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.12
But we are so easily deflected from the journey, aren’t we? Lewis wrote of one reason “Why”: “the first fact is to recognize that your moods change. The next is . . . some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. . . . To be continually reminded of what we believe. . . . If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turnout to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away? (continued) ~~quote of C.S. Lewis from the gook ‘Insights of Discipleship”: to be continued with thoughts from an LDS perspective. . . . C. S. Lewis: Insights on Discipleship (Book craft, Salt Lake City,, Bookcraft, 1999), p.11-12 (continued with LDS perspective. . .)
