My favorite stories from Os Guinness’ latest book, Signals of Transcendence, tell of what God used to draw C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton to faith in Christ. Both of these men were, at least on the surface, unlikely converts. However, God graciously captured their attention, drawing their hearts and minds upward and outward and, eventually, to Christ. They are examples of God’s promise to call even those “who are far off.”
How did God capture the attention of a man of great wit and quick intellect like Chesterton? What signal did He use to point Chesterton beyond his anemic worldview to the greater reality of God’s world? Believe it or not, it was a weed.
Guinness writes,
Looking at a humble dandelion, [Chesterton] woke up to wonder and became grateful for life. …
[T]he humble dandelion told Chesterton that there was beauty in the world, and not just brokenness. Both needed to be explained, together. … He had to look for a philosophy of life that would allow him to explain both the beauty and the brokenness, … to be deeply realistic and yet, as he said, to “enjoy enjoyment” and be grateful.
The seeming absurdity of such simple and often overlooked beauty prompted Chesterton to rethink his worldview. Beauty, even in simple or mundane form, pointed Chesterton to something, or rather Someone, fundamentally good and beautiful behind it all.
What about Lewis? How did God draw this Oxford intellectual? Convinced of his atheistic beliefs and treasuring the autonomy they afforded him, what compelled Lewis on the path to Christianity? According to Guinness, it was joy.
“At its heart, [Lewis’] life was about longing—‘an inconsolable longing’—for something beyond human experience. Such longing was ‘an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.’”
Rather than a singular experience or moment of awakening that led him to faith, Lewis’ signals were the innate longings for joy that returned to him throughout the course of his life, longings that were acknowledged, but never quite fulfilled, by the joys of earthly things.
Lewis experienced hints of joy through nature, music, imagination, and relationship, but “the Joy was not in them; it only came through them.” These signals pointed Lewis to something beyond themselves, to a Source of joy that could satisfy his deep hunger for it.
Of course, by God’s persistent grace, Lewis would find what his heart longed for, and it would compel him to surrender his autonomy and turn to the God he had denied for so long. From staunch atheist to one of the most influential evangelists in Christian history, Lewis’ story testifies to the power of God to redeem even the hardest of hearts.
Today, perhaps even more than then, it can seem as if truth is unhearable. We are tempted to lose hope in the power of the Gospel to draw skeptics and cynics. That is why the stories told in Signals of Transcendence are so important for us to hear and know.
After all, God has not changed. Reality has not changed. The world is still charged with transcendence because that is how God created it.
To read more stories like these, give a gift of any amount to the Colson Center this month at colsoncenter.org/guinnessresource, and we’ll send you a copy of Signals of Transcendence as a thank-you gift. Thank you for partnering with us.
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