{Part 1}

     Those early years of doing nature walks, journals, reading all the books, and scrambling to check all the Charlotte Mason boxes, all the mothering angst over the various day-to-day decisions over meals, bed times, fights, and friends, all of the second guessing myself over my faith, my writing, and my worth starts to take on a different light. Lewis goes on to say that we can feel very much like the school boy in our faith,

“…Those who have attained everlasting life in the vision of God doubtless know very well that it is no mere bribe, but the very consummation of their earthly discipleship; but we who have not yet attained it cannot know this in the same way, and cannot even begin to know it all except by continuing to obey and finding the first reward of our obedience in our increasing power to desire the ultimate reward. Just in proportion as the desire grows, our fear lest it should be a mercenary desire will die away and finally be recognised as an absurdity. But probably this will not, for most of us, happen in a day; poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience, as gradually as the tide lifts a grounded ship. ” 

p. 28, The Weight of Glory, emphasis mine

     I gather all my paper bits and books and scramble indoors as the rain is now coming in earnest. “…by continuing to obey,” Lewis said. And that’s it. The crux of some of this transformational process. Little daily repetitions add up to something lasting. Faithfulness begets fruit. We eat healthy over and over again, we turn to the promises of God day in and day out, we smile, choosing joy, over and over again. We wash that same dish again and again. We sow seeds of dailiness in our faith journey, into our children, into our art, and into truly finding out who we are to Jesus, fitting into our skin in a real way. Can I truly now begin to live? Can my 40th turn around this blue-green ball we call home be a new beginning? Can I, like Charlotte Mason, see a LONG, lifetime view of child rearing and by faith and obedience, just keep sowing? Small gifts, small obedience, adds up in the end.

“It is in the infinitely little we must study the infinitely great.”

~ Charlotte Mason, Home Education, p. 29

      Can I accept that words matter to me and I must paper and ink them out one at a time? Yet as important and life changing these revelations are to me, a life time of growing and prayerfully, continuing to grow, Lewis goes on to allude that the are all symbols of our Truest and Deepest desire…

“If transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious, must bear at best only a symbolical relation to what will truly satisfy.”

p. 29, The Weight of Glory

     The desire for “our own far-off country”… is a “secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.” These past seventeen years of stumbling along through the Bible, the writings of Charlotte Mason, sleepless nights of nursing, the many gorgeous rain showers, the countless meals, stories, and memories, all are glimpses of beauty that are just small peeks at the glory to come. Lewis issues a good perspective and warning to me, if I find myself flying a bit away on the heights of inspiration.

“The books or music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things – the beauty, the memory of our own past – are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the real thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” p.30, emphasis mine

     Lewis, oh my, dear to my heart, talks about how fairy tales and for me, I believe, some fantasy helps keep the gift and knowledge that we aren’t made for this world alive. There is more to this life I’m living, a spiritual reality beyond.

“Our real goal is elsewhere.” p.31

I will continue in Part 3 ~

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