C.S. Lewis is amazing…

I have a once-a-day read devotional thing by C.S. Lewis called A Year with C.S. Lewis that is amazing. It contains bits and pieces of C.S.Lewis’ works that I like to read before I go to bed as a companion to my nightly Bible reading. Perhaps the best one (spoiler alert!) is from May 21 and is entitled “Should the Church Take the Lead” and goes as follows…

People say, ‘The Church ought to give us a lead.’ That is true if they mean it in the right way, but false if they mean it in the wrong way, By the Church they ought to mean the whole body of practicing Christians. And when they say that the Church should give us a lead, they ought to mean that some Christians- those who happen to have the right talents- should become economists and statesmen, and that all economists and statesmen should be Christians, and that their whole efforts in politics and economics should be directed to putting ‘Do as you would be done by’ into action. If that happened, and we others were really ready to take it, then we should find the Christian solution for our own social problems pretty quickly. But, of course, when they ask us for a lead from the church most people mean they want the clergy to put out a political programme. That is silly. The clergy are those particular people within the whole Church who have been specifically trained and set aside to look after what concerns us as creatures who are going to live forever: and we are asking them to do a quite different job for which they have not been trained. The job is really on us, the laymen. The application of Christian principles, say, to trade unionism or education, must come from Christian trade unionists and Christian schoolmasters: just as Christian literature comes from Christian novelists and dramatists- not from the bench of bishops getting together and trying to write plays and novels in their spare time.

This is a profound statement and really changed the way I thought about things. How true! When there is a situation that arises that calls for the opinion of a Christian, how often do we inappropriately turn to our minister? For example, Stem Cell Research. Capitalized because it is such a BIG topic. We want our minister to talk about it! Thinking logically, why in the world do we want a man who went to school and took maybe one science class to talk about one of the most complicated scientific/spiritual topic that has arisen in many years? We don’t! We need a Christian scientist who understands all the minuscule pieces of Stem Cell Research to comment on whether or not it is appropriate. On the topic of the War in Iraq…why not have a Christian General comment on it instead of asking our ministers if it is right? Just like Lewis says above, the ministers are concerned with preaching the word so we will understand it and live forever, not making political speeches or commenting on the latest scientific discovery that took men with multiple doctorates years to discover and develop yet we want our preachers to discuss in 10 minutes on a Sunday night…

Caitlin (my fiance) and I have discussed something along these lines without really knowing it for many years. My goal has always been to become a professional Baseball player and hers has been to become a top notch engineer (which she is well on her way to becoming…) and we had always wondered if these were selfish ambitions. Was it wrong to pursue a secular job when we could become missionaries? Especially when she and I had the potential and talents to do so. Then I read this and everything clicked for me about this subject. If would be awesome if I could become a professional Baseball player! How many people could I reach- perhaps millions? For example, a couple years ago ESPN the Magazine did an article on Mike Sweeney (career man for the Kansas City Royals) and how he was a Christian athlete. How many kids read that and saw that it was okay to be a Christian athlete- something that is hard to come by these days it seems. Plus, with the salary that I would make I could help so many people…

Caitlin as an engineer would work hard and eventually have our hands in all sorts of stuff that was going on where she could use her Christian influence to spread The Word. Capitalized because it is such a BIG topic.

Like Lewis says, “The job is really on us…” so wake up Christians in the world! If you are a politician, doctor, athlete, engineer, teacher, a member of the armed forces, whatever you may be, stand up for God where you are and lets start setting the standard for our professions and make other people say, “I want to be a Christian politician/doctor/athlete/engineer/teacher/member of the armed forces too!”