If you are a C.S. Lewis fan, these are good days. With the coming films Prince Caspian in May and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2009), Narnia remains an “in thing” within popular culture. With even more Narnia sequels on the way and possible film adaptations of other Lewis works, including The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis seems well positioned to be a giant in popular culture for years to come.

But, if C.S. (or Jack, as he liked to be called) were here today, I believe he would quickly bring us back to reality, warning us not to get caught up with “what’s in” at the moment. Lewis believed fashion – what’s cool and hip – is one of Satan’s most powerful seducers. It subtly distracts and derails our faith. Lewis illustrates this point several times in The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce. However, you may not have realized that he even expresses this same belief in The Chronicles of Narnia: Susan’s eventual loss of faith in The Last Battle seems to be based, in part, on her preoccupation with acting grown-up and her penchant for being fashionable.

Fashion may have been a big deal in Lewis’ day. However, “what’s popular” is far more seductive and alluring in today‘s media-saturated, attention-starved world than ever before in history.
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Back in January, I talked about my upcoming cross-country bike tour this summer in combination with the release of my upcoming book, The Expeditionary Man. We just completed the web site for the bike tour and wanted to invite you to check it out at whythebike.com.

What makes a person great? Is it the number of championship rings he wears on his hand? How fast she rises in her career? The amount of money in one’s bank account? In this media-crazed, post-modern culture of ours, greatness is increasingly defined by the superficial, temporal, and the trivial. Yet, as disciples of the only One who is truly great, is there some other standard by which we can measure greatness?

Since God created man in His image, one way to tackle this question is to look at God’s greatness and see what principles trickle down to man. There are limitations to this approach, of course, since He is omnipotent, omniscient, and infinite, and the last time I checked, I was not any of those. Nonetheless, I’ve found that there are some intriguing parallels to consider.

In all of God’s dealings with the world, arguably the two most significant acts He has ever done is to (a) create the world and (b) serve the world by becoming a man in the person of Jesus Christ and dying on the cross for our sins. If these are the two climatic activities of God in His relationship with man, isn’t it possible that these acts also serve as models for us? Perhaps you and I can share greatness when we create and serve in His name. (Or, as J.R.R. Tolkien used to say, a more theologically correct term for human creation is “sub-create” since God is the only one who truly creates ex nihilo, from nothing.

This fact was brought home to me while watching the A&E/BBC movie Longitude , the story of John Harrison, an 18th century English clockmaker who discovered the solution to the age-old “longitude problem”— determining a ship’s longitudinal position while at sea. I loved the film, but what has remained with me since was a statement at the film’s end reflecting on Harrison’s accomplishment:

What makes a man great? A man may be great in his aims, or in his achievements, or in both, but I think that man is truly great who makes the world his debtor… who does something for the world which the world needs and which nobody before him has done or known how to do.

Just as Harrison “made the world his debtor” by inventing a special timepiece that solved the longitude problem, so you can do the same when your creative efforts or servant heart fills a void left empty before you came along. For in the end, perhaps living a life of true significance is achieved only when you create or serve in Jesus’ name.

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Part 11 in the U2 Unplugged Series

“I Found It”. This slogan was used by an evangelistic organization back in the mid-1970s as a creative way to spread the gospel through mass marketing techniques. As a child growing up during that era, I remember yellow “I Found It” bumper stickers, t-shirts, billboards, and advertisements appearing everywhere around our home town. But as I look back at that campaign, I wonder how effective the slogan really was. There’s some truth in the message, but “I Found It” seems too simplistic and perhaps even misleading to describe the Christian faith. After all, believers aren’t immune to problems: we still struggle with addictions, experience tragedy, and make lousy decisions. We get a taste of Jesus Christ and his fantastic plans for us in the future, but never experience them fully as long as we are living in this sinful world.

In one of their best known songs from their entire discography, U2 sings about an incomplete journey of faith in “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” [Lyrics] [iTunes]. On the surface, the title may sound like a confession of unbelief. But, in reality, the song is an honest look at the struggle that all believers face as we seek a fulfilled life.

Flickers

A longing. It’s the pang in your stomach when you’re in love. You can sense it as you gaze over the glorious snow-capped peaks of the Colorado Rockies. You can feel it in your soul during a great worship or prayer time. C.S. Lewis observed that this intense desire, which he refers to as “joy”, is for something that nothing on earth ever truly quenches. You can catch a glimpse of it, but this longing is fleeting. In his poem Dymer, Lewis reflects on joy’s unattainable nature: “Joy flickers on the razor-edge of the present and is gone.” Lewis believed that was exactly how God intended it, that joy is meant to be a clue or a pointer to the fact we are made for another place, for his “far off country.”
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