by Galadrielle » Nov 20, 2013 1:27 pm
I am 52 years old. When I was 50 years old, I started to read the Bible on my own for the very first time and am just now, 35 years after having accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior, getting to know Jesus. When I was 41 years old, my father John Angus entered Aslan's Country and became a Prince. When I was 7 years old, for the very first time, I entered Jack's world. Jesus: two years. My father: forty one years. Jack: A whopping FORTY FIVE YEARS! The man whose life and work has had the strongest impact on my life for the longest time is Jack. How did it all begin?
I was a seven-year-old Brownie Scout and voracious reader, enrolled at an excellent Christian school that had chapel every day. My spare time was spent reading Gone With the Wind. How I wanted to be just like Scarlett O'Hara. One night, while my parents were at a PTA meeting, my babysitter, my four-year-old brother, and I were watching the Addams Family - my favorite show. My parents returned from their meeting, waited patiently for The Addams Family to end, and paid the sitter. Suddenly, my Dad boomed "Look what Father Edwards has lent us to enjoy!" Father Edwards was the School Chaplain and Assistant Pastor and he knew all about my love of books. Dad grabbed my brother, sat down in the big armchair, and patted the arm of the chair, motioning for me to perch on it. Then all of a sudden, he began to read the magic words that began The Magician's Nephew. I was completely mesmerized. But the rains came, and with it, Dad's work responsibilities as a flood control engineer, and our nightly reads came to a pause. I finished Gone With the Wind, and then I picked up the Magician's Nephew and finished IT. My parents, meanwhile, had bought me a Narnia set all of my own, and before long, I found myself in the realm of Queen Lucy. I stopped wanting to be like Scarlett and instead desired to be like Queen Lucy. I took up writing, and while the other girls wanted to be doctors and actresses and ballerinas, I soon learned that C.S. Lewis - my great hero even when I was seven - was a medievalist. That was what I wanted to be when I grew up. And so I did. Thirty years after my first step into Narnia - exactly thirty years later - I found myself in the magical land where it all began: Oxford. I had been awarded a scholarship to study philosophy with the C.S. Lewis Foundation's C.S. Lewis Summer Institute on the Centennial Year of Jack's birth, where there were intense moments of absolute joy to the point where I cried, and I, like Queen Lucy in The Last Battle, was even too happy to speak.