If you haven’t already read this amazing book by C. S. Lewis (which you should), there are possible spoilers ahead. You have been warned:

“‘But how could it be true, sir?’ said Peter.

‘Why do you say that?’ asked the Professor.

‘Well, for one thing,’ said Peter, ‘if it was real why doesn’t everyone find this country every time they go to the wardrobe? I mean, there was nothing there when we looked; even Lucy didn’t pretend there was.’

“What has that to do with it?” said the Professor.

‘Well, sir, if things are real, they’re there all the time.’

‘Are they?’ said the Professor; and Peter did not know quite what to say.

‘But there was no time,’ said Susan. ‘Lucy had had no time to have gone anywhere, even if there was such a place. She came running after us the very moment we were out of the room. It was less than a minute, and she pretended to have been away for hours.’

‘That is the very thing that makes her story so likely to be true,’ said the Professor. ‘If there really is a door in this house that leads to some other world (and I should warn you that this is a very strange house, and even I know very little about it)—if, I say, she had got into another world, I should not be at all surprised to find that the other world had a separate time of its own; so that however long you stayed there it would never take up any of our time. On the other hand, I don’t think many girls of her age would invent that idea for themselves. If she had been pretending, she would have hidden for a reasonable time before coming out and telling her story.’

‘But do you really mean, sir,’ said Peter, ‘that there could be other worlds—all over the place, just round the corner—like that?’

‘Nothing is more probable,’ said the Professor, taking off his spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself, ‘I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.’

‘But what are we to do?’ said Susan. She felt that the conversation was beginning to get off the point.

‘My dear young lady,’ said the Professor, suddenly looking up with a very sharp expression at both of them, ‘there is one plan which no one has yet suggested and which is well worth trying.’

‘What’s that?’ said Susan.

‘We might all try minding our own business,’ said he. And that was the end of that conversation.”

One day I will find a way into Narnia. I just know it.

“What is coming upon the world is the Light of the World. It is Christ. That is the comfort of it. The challenge of it is that it has not come yet. Only the hope for it has come, only the longing for it. In the meantime we are in the dark, and the dark, God knows, is also in us. We watch and wait for a holiness to heal us and hallow us, to liberate us from the dark. Advent is like the hush in a theater just before the curtain rises. It is like the hazy ring around the winter moon that means the coming of snow which will turn the night to silver. Soon. But for the time being, our time, darkness is where we are” (Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark).

Apparently, we’re having a shorter than usual Advent season. It starts next Sunday and lasts only 22 days this year. But for a lot of us, we’ve been waiting a lot longer than 22 days for God to show up strong in the world and make everything right. Some days, it feels like 2,000 years plus 22 days.

But just as the hush in the theater means the curtain is about to rise and just as the hazy ring around the moon means snow will soon be falling, so we know that Advent will come and God will keep His promises and be as faithful as ever.

I loved this the first time I saw it, and I still love it. I wish I knew who originated it. I’d love to give proper credit. But I can at least keep sharing it for those who need to hear it or read it.

“He demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration. Do we suppose that they can do Him any good, or fear, like the chorus in Milton, that human irreverence can bring about ‘His glory’s diminution’? A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell. But God wills our good, and our good is to love Him (with that responsive love proper to creatures) and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces. If we do not, that only shows that what we are trying to love is not yet God—though it may be the nearest approximation to God which our thought and fantasy can attain” (C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain).

God doesn’t need our worship and adoration. In fact, God doesn’t need us. God has no need at all because God is in Himself completely self-sufficient and whole.

It’s we who need to worship God to remind us that we in fact are not God. God is outside of us and is completely other, not just a better, faster, stronger version of us. As I read earlier, God and His ways are beyond our complete understanding or otherwise we wouldn’t need trust. We wouldn’t need faith.

We worship God because there’s no way we could have ever known God on our own. We would never have even sought God on our own if God hadn’t first sought us. We worship God because He has made Himself known to us in a way that we could understand and in a way that didn’t destroy us.

Remember that if we in our present state saw God in all His glory as He is, we would die. It would be too much for our senses and all our capacity. The finite could never hope to grasp the infinite.

But God made Himself Jesus so we could understand God.

And so we worship.

“Jesus learned obedience by the things which He suffered, not by the things which He enjoyed. In order to fit you for His purposes both here and in eternity, He has lent you this sorrow. But He bears the heavier end of the Cross laid upon you! [See Hebrews 5:8]” (Elisabeth Elliott).

I find something about older books that I don’t find in the newer ones. It seems to me that there was much more of a prophetic bold voice in the writers of faith from back in the day that’s not nearly as present in this age. Maybe it’s because talk about suffering doesn’t sell books or build brands anymore.

I personally would much rather learn obedience by doing what I enjoy. If there was a way to godliness through napping, I’d take it. But unfortunately, that’s not the way of Jesus.

Throughout the prophecies and gospels, we find a Man of Suffering acquainted with grief. We see that His whole life was leading to death on a cross at Golgotha. We learn about a ministry where people by and large rejected this Messiah because He talked about things like eating His flesh and drinking His blood and taking up your cross to be His disciple.

I don’t think Jesus would ever want us to deliberately seek out way to suffer and be unhappy. But I do think that more and more as we seek to follow Jesus, we will have trouble. We will suffer. We will be ridiculed and misunderstood and rejected and hated. Some of us will suffer physically. Some of us may well lose our lives.

But we will not undergo anything that Jesus hasn’t already endured first. We will never be asked to carry any cross that Jesus hasn’t carried first, to walk any road He hasn’t already gone before and made a way. We have the promise that He will be with us to the end of this age where everything’s upside down and people celebrate evil and condemn good.

May we endure to the end not because we are perfectly faithful to Jesus but because He is perfectly faithful to us. Amen.

“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind” (C. S. Lewis). 

On this date 60 years ago, we lost John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley (author of Brave New World). While most of the world only remembers the first Jack (as in Kennedy), many like me point to the second Jack (as Lewis preferred to be called) as greatly influential in their growing in both faith and imagination. Narnia lives on.

I don’t recall seeing anything about JFK on social media or the news (what little I watched of it). It’s mind-blowing to think that it’s been six decades since he was assassinated, regardless of what your thoughts are on who actually pulled the trigger. And yes, I saw the Oliver Stone movie in a theater long, long ago.

I get JFK is an icon. I get that November 22, 1963 remains a watershed moment in American history, a day of tragedy that led to better days where civil rights laws were passed.

For me, C. S. Lewis was much more influential. It started with the Narnia books and progressed from there. No one could take a complicated theological or apologetical concept and explain it in layman’s terms quite like he did. After all, intelligence isn’t spouting a lot of big words but taking something complex and making it sound simple.

His death was overshadowed by the news of the assassination of President Kennedy, as was the death of philosopher Aldous Huxley, who also died on the same day. On this day, we remember them all.

Everybody needs a cheery little animal who can fit in their hand. I can’t speak to hedgehogs as pets, but they seem cute and cheery enough if that’s your thing.

Honestly, everyone needs at least one person in their life who will always be an encourager. Everyone needs that someone who believes in them even when they don’t (or can’t).

I know in my own life the difference one small word from one person can make. Sometimes, it has the power to turn a good day into a bad one. But I can testify that one lone encouraging word has the power to transform a bad day into a good one.

I also believe that everyone needs someone who will always tell them the truth. As my old pastor used to say, the first person you lie to is yourself. If you only surround yourself with people who agree with you and tell you what you want to hear, you will go on repeating the same patterns and making the same bad choices. Like those tiny mirrors that fit on your side-view mirrors, you need someone to point out your blind spots.

Powerful people in positions of leadership are most vulnerable to temptation and failing when they don’t have accountability in the form of someone who is willing to ask the tough questions and tell them the honest truth.

Obviously, the idea is always to speak the truth in love for the betterment of the person, not as a weapon to tear that person down. The best way to speak truth is in the context of a trusting relationship where the other has invited you to speak into their life and given you permission to ask those tough questions and say the uncomfortable truths.

But I think even when speaking a word of rebuke, it’s best to sandwich it between words of encouragement and praise. Even then, we still need people who still believe in us when we veer off course.

Basically, be like that little hedgehog.

At first it seems as impossible and absurd as if a whole river served to water one single solitary flower. It seems preposterous that God should love us that much — that God should love you or me that much. But it’s true.

An infinite God’s unconditional love means that God can love each individual as if that person were the only one to receive the fullness of God’s love. It defies any kind of math logic where each person gets a fraction. God’s math means that each person receives 100% out of infinite resources.

That’s a good reason to be thankful. That’s a good reason for a Thanksgiving holiday, whether you ascribe to the original Pilgrim story or not. Actually, that should make you and I want to treat every day like a Thanksgiving — minus the part where we gorge ourselves into food comas.

The Bible commands us to live in gratitude and thanksgiving in view of what God has done for us. That’s like commanding someone who is parched with thirst to drink water or telling someone who is nearly frostbitten with cold to seek warmth. We only have to live with our eyes open to God to find a reason to be grateful and thankful.

Apart from God opening our eyes, we could never see. Apart from God seeking us first, we should never have sought God at all. That very source of thanksgiving to God comes from God and is a natural overflow of all that God lavishes on us each and every single day.

May our thanksgiving lead to thanks-living.

I don’t know what it is about a good fantasy book that gives me all the feels. I don’t mean a Game of Thrones-type book. I’m more into The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. Currently, I’m reading The Wind and the Willows. And by reading, I mean with an actual book with actual pages that you turn with actual hands with actual fingers.

What is is about elves and hobbits and dwarves that appeals to me? Why am I drawn to talking rats and moles? Is it wrong that I want to live at Bag End with Bilbo and Frodo Baggins? I’d even put in my fair share of washing dishes and setting the table.

I think maybe these days we all need an escape from reality. We need somewhere to go where the headlines aren’t all death and doom. Whenever it’s a cold and rainy day, there’s nothing better than to read about someone traipsing through a meadow on a bright sunny afternoon. Or to imagine the possibility of stumbling on to a door that leads straight out of this world into Middle Earth or Narnia.

For me, there’s always the joy of revisiting a classic along with familiar characters and locations. It’s comforting when you remember what’s coming next and can’t wait to get to that part.

I’m always looking for recommendations, so if you can think of any send them my way by emailing them to gmendel72@icloud.com. May you always find a comfy chair and a good book to keep you company on those cold wintry nights.

Honestly, I’ve never given much thought to the question of why Jesus folded the shroud that covered His face when He rose from the grave. I was focused on other details, as I imagine the disciples were, but in the Bible even the smallest details have meaning.

This is about the best explanation that I have ever seen as to why it was folded and not simply left crumpled:

This is one I can honestly say I have never seen circulating so; if this touches you, you may want to forward it.

“Why did Jesus fold the linen burial cloth after His resurrection? I never noticed this….

The Gospel of John (20:7) tells us that the napkin, which was placed over the face of Jesus, was not just thrown aside like the grave clothes. The Bible takes an entire verse to tell us that the napkin was neatly folded, and was placed separate from the grave clothes. Early Sunday morning, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and found that the stone had been rolled away from the entrance. She ran and found Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved. She said, ‘They have taken the Lord’s body out of the tomb, and I don’t know where they have put him!’ Peter and the other disciple ran to the tomb to see.. The other disciple outran Peter and got there first. He stooped and looked in and saw the linen cloth lying there, but he didn’t go in.

Then Simon Peter arrived and went inside. He also noticed the linen wrappings lying there, while the cloth that had covered Jesus’ head was folded up and lying to the side.

Was that important? Absolutely!

Is it really significant? Yes!

In order to understand the significance of the folded napkin, you have to understand a little bit about Hebrew tradition of that day. The folded napkin had to do with the Master and Servant, and every Jewish boy knew this tradition.

When the servant set the dinner table for the master, he made sure that it was exactly the way the master wanted it…

The table was furnished perfectly, and then the servant would wait, just out of sight, until the master had finished eating, and the servant would not dare touch that table, until the master was finished. Now, if the master were done eating, he would rise from the table, wipe his fingers, his mouth, and clean his beard, and would wad up that napkin and toss it onto the table.

The servant would then know to clear the table. For in those days, the wadded napkin meant, ‘I’m done.’

But if the master got up from the table, and folded his napkin, and laid it beside his plate, the servant would not dare touch the table, because……….. The folded napkin meant, ‘I’m coming back!’

He is Coming Back!”