The world feels particularly dark these days, doesn’t it?
I talk to a lot of people within the field of mental health and suicide prevention. And there just seems to be this growing sense of… hopelessness. A sense of fear.
A lot of fear about the future.
And I’ll be honest with you, there was a period of time (in 2020, mostly) where gave into my own fears. Everything was so dark and confusing. I could barely function.
But I’m learning that fear is the GREATER pandemic. If you give up your faith and trade it for fear, then you—by default—surrender your hope. But if you hold onto faith in God and move forward as best you can, then hope will instantly reveal itself.
I learned that from C.S. Lewis.
C.S. Lewis was a British writer and Christian apologist who is probably best-known for his fiction series The Chronicles of Narnia. At the height of his career, many people lived in fear of all-out nuclear war. Adults were scared to leave their homes. Children were taught ridiculous “duck-and-cover” drills in school (as though that would save them from an atomic bomb). New political alliances were forged and “mutually assured destruction” became an international creed.
It was during this time—a time of fear and paranoia—that C.S. Lewis wrote these remarkable words of faith. Ironically, these words seem particularly relevant during our time:
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
— “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948) in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays
And so the question is: How will the bomb find you? Will you live a life of cowardice and fear? Or will you live a life of courage and faith?
