The Price We Pay For Love

The Price We Pay for Love

Clive wrote about faraway places he never visited. He created magical worlds seen through children’s eyes though he was a middle-aged college professor. He wrote a bestselling book on love even though he had never experienced romance. Later he authored a book on the problem of pain in spite of the fact that he was living a comfortable life. When his nation’s capital was being bombed into rubble, he lifted the spirits of his countrymen with rousing radio talks. Yet he lived far from the bombs in a peaceful university town.

In short, Clive was the world’s foremost expert on things he had never experienced. The biggest excitement in his life was sitting at the same table in the same pub on the same evening every week with the same cronies, creating adventures that they would never experience in places they would never visit. Beyond that, he was a slightly dumpy professor who shared a cluttered cottage with his bachelor brother.

Then Clive’s life was turned upside down by a visiting author from America. Joy would give him the greatest happiness in his life, only to leave him to cope with unbearable grief.

The two were polar opposites. She was a recent divorcée while he was a confirmed bachelor. Where he was stodgy, she was flamboyant. He was boringly conventional. She loved to flout tradition. He was a staunch Anglican. She jumped impulsively from Judaism to communism to evangelicalism. Yet in spite of their stark differences, Joy and Clive formed a deep friendship that eventually blossomed into love.

Just when the fifty-eight-year-old bachelor ratcheted up his courage to propose, she discovered that she had terminal bone cancer. He wanted to call off the wedding, insisting that losing a wife would be too painful. Joy responded, “The extent to which we love each other now is the extent to which you will feel pain after I’m gone. That’s the deal.”

It took Clive several days to realize that having Joy now was worth the pain later. On March 21, 1957, they were married in her hospital room. The next few years were deliriously happy. Then she died of cancer, plunging him into suicidal despair that almost destroyed his faith. He recovered enough to write A Grief Observed. A haunting line leaps off one of its pages: “I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”

Three years after cancer stole his beloved Joy, he collapsed in his bedroom and died. The world hardly noticed the passing of this author of the beloved Chronicles of Narnia because a young American president was assassinated in Dallas on the same day. But fifty-four years later, C. S. Lewis is remembered as a towering giant who changed the landscape of literature. Maybe you’re facing the loss of someone or something very special. Perhaps you are grieving for a loss already suffered. You might take some solace in “the deal” offered by Joy Davidman to her fearful English bachelor:

The pain of your loss is living proof of the joy you possessed.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Romans 15:13, NIV