The book begins with the couple’s meeting and romance in an ivy league college.  They define themselves as “high pagans,” seeking after the higher virtues of classical culture.  They believed that they could keep the “in love” feeling that couples experience early on when they share everything.  They share the details of their days, passionately explore the other’s interests, and even sail around the world together.  The uniqueness of their romance inspires Lewis’s words, and the title “A Severe Mercy.”

Unfortunately, Jesus messes this up.  As honest agnostics and intellectuals, they decide that someday they must look into the claims of Christianity.  When they move to Oxford they encounter intellectuals who also follow Christ, and they begin their investigation.  This result is a correspondance and friendship with C.S. Lewis, who helps personalize much that he his books discuss.  They both experience conversion, but their endless romance is never the same.  Vanauken candidly explains the strains this new faith took on their marriage, and how it took death to rebuild their relationship.

Much of the book grapples the illness and death of Davy, and how their new faith was affected.  Fascinatingly, the correspondence includes letters both before and after Lewis’s own experience with burying a wife.

It’s hard to capture in a blog post the beautiful, thought provoking and heart wrenching nature of this book.  It presents a picture of how faith can be intellectual, how romance can be meaningful, and how death can be accepted.  It is the story of a life well lived, and a love worth emulating.

It’s true that life is tough. And when you realize that it’s tough, it gets a little better. It’s hard not to get lost in the darkness. Suffering is immediate rich and important in a way that our small daily joys pale against.

Which is why it is essential to remember that life is good.

As I was leaving the Emmanuel Orphanage in Delhi, Lakshmi, a six year old girl with piercing blue eyes clung to me and cried “Uncle, Uncle!” She, and all those around hre had been abandoned and persecuted their entire young lives, but they still knew how to love deeply, in a way I struggle to remember. Life is good.

I know a guy who begrudgingly gave the keys of his car to a single mom he barely knew for two weeks. They are good friends now.  Life is good.

A friend of mine has often thought that the only way he could ever get a “good girl.” He felt like the only ones interested had different values and would treat him poorly. Then he met a girl, and has been attached to her at the hip ever since. Seeing them together is life seeing something that was always meant to be. Life is good.

Another friend of mine went to a foreign country to work with an NGO. His work was interupted when his teammates were captured, and he had to spend to next few months there negotiating their release.  As heartwrenching as that was, he also sees it as the most important thing he has ever done. He took a furlough to recover, and is returning calmer, closer to God, and more excited about discipleship than ever. Life is good.

I get depressed sometimes. This summer was one of those. In the midst of that, I got a small, unexpected gift that helped shake me out of my myopic viewpoint. Life is good.

The scriptures teach when God created the world he called it good. When he created man, he called man really good. Then, sin wrecked all of that. Twisted and misshapen, like a fun house or a computer photobooth. But when we look behind the brokenness, we get to see that there is a heart wrenching beauty to it all.

The scriptures teach that this is not the way it was meant to be. Life is meant to be good. God has restored, is restoring and eventually will restore in full.

In time, the heartwrench will be over, and all we will see is that Life is Good.

(This is just such a post.)

There’s some wisdom to that, and  it applies to more than just writing.  I think life is the same way.

I know a guy who is tired to living.  He’s not suicidal.  Just tired.  Tired of doing the same thing again and again with the same result.  Not sure what to do different.

A friend of mine has reached his job’s ceiling.  He’s good at it, but isn’t making a living, and doesn’t know where to go or what to do differently.

Another friend has realized that he is in a cycle of bad relationships.  He likes the girls that are bad for him.  At his most cynical, he thinks it is his fault, and these are the only kinds of girls he has a chance with.

Perhaps this advice about writing is just advice about life.  When you don’t know what to do, you should just do something.  Find a prompt, something to get you moving.

Tired of life?  Don’t get caught up in the Meta, and just get through today.  It won’t always be this way.

Hit your ceiling?  Keep working really hard.  Jesus said that to he gives more to those who have been faithful with a little.

Can’t find the perfect relationship?  Try something different.  Not solely for romance, but for the chance to learn about yourself and make a new friend.

Life is a blank paper.  You are a genius with writer’s block.

Just write.

1. Don’t do certain bad things.

2. Don’t hang out with people who do said bad things.

At some point two things occurred to me:

1.  I will regularly do bad things.

2.  If I’m going to be like Jesus, I will regularly spend time with people who do things I don’t.

In many ways, these revelations were freeing.  It allowed me to relax a little, and embrace the forgiveness God promises.  It also means that my circle of friends has increased from people who are just like me to include people from different races, political parties, churches and sexual orientations.

I’ve learned a lot from this more graceful stance, and rather than fill a book with what I’ve learned, I point you to the words of Henri Nouwen.

But to be totally honest, it’s a bit exhausting.

Giving grace to yourself requires that you are conscious of when you fail to live up to your standards.  It also means that you regularly take time to ask God for forgiveness for your failures.  Just taking time to recognize those is exhausting.

Giving grace to others requires constantly staring at and listening to things you might not like.  It forces you to think outside the box and question why you do what you do.  It gives you far less opportunities to argue for your way.  Like anything that makes you stronger, it tears you up a bit first.

Although grace is exhausting, hope is enlivening.  This has altered how I look at the time I spend gathered with my church community.  Whether it’s liturgy or cooking dinner or going for a ride or hitting up happy hour we are brought together by a common hope. We rest in our hope that we are forgiven.  We rest in the humility that it is God, not us who will sort out the good and the bad.  We rest in our hope that history is headed somewhere.

We rest because we trust that no matter how exhausting grace is, it’s worth it.

This past Sunday Don Vanderslice of Mosaic Austin visited us at Vox and shared this classic quote from a commencement speech that great American novelist David Foster Wallace gave before his suicide.  DFW had uncovered the lies, and, I have to hope, found the truth.  Think about what you’ll worship this week.

Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.