Inspiring

I know I have not posted for about a week. This is for a number of reasons. First, I have been trying to get used to the medication that I'm on. The nausea and insomnia have gone away but have been replaced with me getting tired a little more easily, so I have to try to get as much sleep as possible. Second, I'm not quite sure what to say about my situation. I'm going to therapy, I'm taking depression medication, and the people who are close to me in my life reacted both positively and negatively to this. One of my best friends strongly disapproves of my actions, which really only makes this harder. My other best friend is supportive as she can be while living hundreds of miles away.

But I'm tired of talking about my situation.

Today, I want to post something that very much touched my heart when I read it. I've been taking a class on C.S. Lewis and Tolkien at the college and this week we read from Lewis' Mere Christianity. I've been interested in reading this for quite a while because of Lewis' beginnings as an atheist and I've been curious to know why it is that Lewis decided to convert to Christianity.

One passage particularly struck me today as I was answering some questions for a homework assignment and I thought I would share it with all of you. This exerpt is from the very end of Chapter One.

"And, of course, that raises a very big question. If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong? And for many years I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling 'whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn't it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren't all your arguments simply a complicated attempted to avoid the obvious?' But then that threw me back into another difficulty.

"My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too - for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fantasies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist - in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless - I found I was force to assume that one part of reality - namely my idea of justice - was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning."