“I read Lewis for comfort and pleasure many years ago, and a glance into the books revives my old admiration.”
John Updike
I’m not sure what the worst place I’ve stayed this year has been, but the nicest place is easy.
One of my favorite all-time illustrations was written by C.S. Lewis. In may have been a section in his book The Problem of Pain, but I think he covered the subject in a few places in his writings and talks. He used the metaphor of a journey to explain the dangers, toils and snares we face in life. It’s been a few years since I last read Lewis’ essay, so with apologies to Lewis here’s my interpretation.
We’re like travelers on a distant journey and before we reach our final destination we come face to face with day after day when we’re tired of walking the road where the sun is beating down on us, times where we’re hungry for food, thirsty for water, times when we yearn for a warm fire to rest our bones from the cold winds, and desire conversation with strangers that will encourage our souls.
And every once in a while on our journey we come upon an inn along the way where we find a place to rest from the shelter of the storms, a place to have a good meal, and a pleasant time with people we’ve just met. As you curl up with a warm blanket by the fire, you wish you could call this place home. But you can’t mistake it for your final destination, and tomorrow you must go out into the elements that beat down on you—but you’re thankful for the inns along the way, because they give you a foretaste of your final destination.
In the past week I was able to spend three days at an inn along the way in Kennebunkport, Maine and I’m thankful for the experience. It made up for the 21 hour day I had the day I arrived due in part to a flight being cancelled by Continental, a sore back from running with my camera and such to catch a last-minute flight to Boston in hopes of me having a chance of getting to my shoot on time (a shoot that popped up just the day before), it made up for having to drive a total of ten hours of extra driving due to the cancelled flight—not including the time spent changing a tire just before midnight when I had to retrieve my luggage and tripod that was on my original flight.
Woe is me, right?
Right…
This place made up for all the places I’ve had to stay this year that were less than ideal—the cigarette smokey smelling room in Clear Lake, Iowa and the one with the dead crickets in Oklahoma City—all the places whether because of budgets, lack of availability, or bad timing I’ve had to stay. And while I was on a shoot and working a chunk of the time at my inn along the way, I did get to spend a little more time here than the Mt. Everest climber who has five minutes at the top of the world before he or she has to head down.
When the Apostle Paul wrote a couple thousand years ago that he “learned to be content in all things” it’s easy to overlook that he says it’s something he had to learn to do. I’m still working on learning to be content in all things, but the inns along the way are something I now appreciate when they come every once in a while, rather than expect them on a daily basis.
John D. Rockefeller when asked “How much is enough?” is reported to have said, “Just a little bit more.”
One could probably take a chunk of great movies made and put their theme into the spirit of Lewis or the camp of Rockefeller.
The harsh reality is just days after I left my inn along the way, Kennebunkport (and all of New England) are expecting a record October snow storm that is expected to leave millions of homes without power for as long as a week. Keep those people in your prayers.
P.S. While Lewis is commonly known today as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, the Oxford scholar was quite an accomplished theologian. If you’ve never seen the movie Shadowlands starring Anthony Hopkins as Lewis and co-starring Debra Winger as Joy Gresham, it’s a movie I recommend. Both Winger and screenwriter William Nicholson were nominated for Oscars in that 1993 film.
