By Chris WittsSaturday 11 Jan 2025Morning Devotions with Chris WittsFaithReading Time: 1 minute
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Transcript:
If you saw the movie Shadowlands, as I did some years ago and I can thoroughly recommend it, you might recall that Anthony Hopkins played CS Lewis, and you saw a very convincing portrayal of this uncalculated risk that we take if we let love into our lives. And let me explain what I mean by that. He was CS Lewis. He was the stereotype of the Oxford Don. You know, a confirmed bachelor until he was nearly 60.
A brilliant scholar, of an unusual subject that was, it was actually medieval and Renaissance literature. And here was something that CS Lewis was really passionate about. And then he met a woman, Joy Gresham. Joy was an American writer and a poet. She’d come to England to work for a few years. She was a passionate, emotional person who swept dry old CS Lewis off his feet, as it were, and he actually fell head over heels in love with her just like a young man.
The risk of love
He was a very private man, says Lewis. He kept the feelings to himself. He didn’t even know that he was really in love with Joy, or at least he couldn’t bring himself to entertain that notion. But she wanted to stay in England to pursue her writing career, but couldn’t because of the immigration laws of that time. So Lewis decided that he would help her out by entering into what he called a marriage of convenience, lending her his name so that she could legally stay and work in England. And he kept telling himself this was nothing but a business arrangement.
But the business arrangement turned into something else, and if you saw the film, you would have known it became a profound love affair. Just as the springtime of romance was blooming, the winter of tragedy suddenly hit their lives, and joy was stricken with an inoperable bone cancer. And while she was in hospital, Lewis began to discover just how deeply he loved this woman, and in one of the most touching scenes in the movie, he decides to make the business arrangement a true marriage.
And we saw how much a person will risk for love because he knew that Joy only had a short time to live with cancer unless a miracle came and he, he just knew that in a few months that she would die and be lost from him, but he put his feelings on hold, got married in a Christian ceremony there in the hospital, and this was a very amazing story – lots of pain, lots of grief.
But it sort of showed something very, very real in this movie that love is always a risky business. That’s really what I want to say. Maybe you realise that when you love someone, that there is that chance of hurt or rejection, misunderstanding. It can be very difficult to predict this thing called love, can’t it, and how it will happen.
But to really love someone means that we become vulnerable to hurts or the risk even of losing that person just as it was for CS Lewis. We’ve got to learn to put that other person’s interests and needs ahead of our own. And of course, it is risky business because no one likes pain or rejection. And when we do truly love somebody else, we open ourselves up to that risk of pain. You know, in John chapter 12 in the New Testament, we read a story about a lady named Mary of Bethany who suddenly turned up at a home. There was Jesus and his friends enjoying a meal, and she took a very expensive bottle of perfume and poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair, and one of the disciples there, Judas, was outraged at the waste of money. The perfume she used would have cost around about 300 days’ wages. The perfume was so expensive, you wouldn’t normally do that sort of thing.
Judas regarded the action as a complete waste, and that the proceeds of the money could have been given to a lot of poor people. But Jesus then talked about the risk of love, and he said, ‘You’ll always have the poor with you, but you don’t always have me, Mary, he said, she knows this. And she brought it to keep for the day of my burial, and what she’s done has been a very beautiful thing.’
So really that was a risky business. Mary, who threw caution to the winds didn’t count the cost, but she wanted to show her love for her master Jesus Christ. So I suppose in a way that’s extravagant love, isn’t it? It’s giving to the highest degree. And God gives us the greatest example of that extravagant love, when He gave Himself for us.
Let’s Pray
Father, we do want to learn. We want to keep our minds open to what you’re saying to us. Thank you, Lord, that us loving others can be risky, but it’s worth it. Amen.