THE CITY

Winter 2015
Today this applies far more obviously even than when Lewis was
working and writing — he died in 1963. If I want something, runs
the modern idiom — and I experience this reaction almost every
time I speak or write — I need something; and if I need something,
thus I must have something. To the Christian, however, God knows
our needs better than we do, and also knows that our wants and
our needs are distinctly different phenomena. Which leads to the
challenge of why God would allow us to go and do wrong, and to
want something that is not necessarily to our eternal advantage, or
even to our immediate good.
We have freedom, and we have free will. We have that free will
because God, according to the Christian, is love, and no lover would
allow anything else. A man who locks his wife away in a room,
even if he does so for what he believes to be motives of kindness
and devotion, is not a lover but an abuser, and a parent who is so
protective of a child that the youngster is never allowed to leave
the house will, even for what they consider the best of reasons,
cause untold psychological damage to that young person. I always
remember when our first child, a son, was around twelve years old,
and attended a school a few miles from where we lived. We had
driven him to school each day, but it was now time for him to take
public transportation. We worried about letting him go off alone in
the crowded and, frankly, sometimes dangerous big city. But it was
time, it was the right time. Off he went. And there was me, waiting
at the end of the day, sitting by the door, anxious to see him come
home. When he did — totally ignoring me beyond a perfunctory
teenage grunt of acknowledgement — which is the way it ought to
be, I was so incredibly happy and relieved. My wife and I had to let
him go, but we were so relieved when he returned. Imagine, then,
how God feels when we return home to him. He lets us go, he sets us
free, he acts as a loving father does, but he so much wants us home
again. I was so happy when my son came home. That God allows us
freedom, and sometimes a freedom to disobey, says everything about
God’s love for us, and nothing against it.
Yet while he wants us to return to him, he cannot force us to take
this course of action, and if we choose an eternity without him what
we have chosen is Hell. This is important, because a lot of people
27