Dispatch № 017 · Aug 29, 2026
The Most Reluctant Convert
C.S. Lewis did not come running. He got talked into it on a walk, late at night, by his friends. And God took it.
In 1929, a man knelt down in a room in Oxford and admitted that God was God. He said later he was probably the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England.
That was C.S. Lewis. The same guy who wrote Narnia and Mere Christianity. The one people quote on coffee mugs.
He did not come running. He got there slowly, and not happily.
But this is the part that gets me. Lewis believed in God for two full years before he believed in Jesus. He was stuck. He could not get past the idea that the Christian story was just another old myth, one more dying-and-rising god like the ones he taught in his classes.
So on a September night in 1931, he went for a walk with two friends. J.R.R. Tolkien was one of them. They walked a path called Addison's Walk at Magdalen College and talked until three in the morning.
Tolkien told him something simple. You are right that it is a myth. It is the myth that actually happened. All those old stories about a god who dies and comes back, that longing people have been writing down for thousands of years, that was people reaching for something real. And then it showed up in a body, in a place you can find on a map, under a governor with a name.
Lewis went home. A few days later he took a ride to the zoo in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle. He wrote that when they set out he did not believe Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and by the time they arrived he did. No lightning. No feeling. He just got there.
That part always sticks with me.
Because most of us have been handed a version of faith that requires a big moment. Tears. A stage. A date you can circle. And if you do not have one, you wonder if it took.
Lewis did not have one. He had two friends who kept telling him the truth, a long walk, and a motorcycle ride to see the animals.
You did not choose me, but I chose you. — John 15:16
The whole time Lewis was arguing, God was working. The reluctance did not slow it down. Lewis thought he was doing the searching, and it turned out he was the one being found.
He wrote something else too. He said if he found in himself a desire that nothing in this world could satisfy, the most likely explanation was that he was made for another world.
He was not being poetic about it. He thought that ache was telling you something true.
You know the feeling. You get the thing you wanted. The job, the house, the trip, the relationship. And it is good. And then a couple weeks later there is that quiet gap again, the one you cannot name and do not talk about at parties.
Lewis said quit treating that gap like something broken in you. He thought it was a sign, maybe the best evidence you have that you were built for more than this.
He has put eternity into man's heart. — Ecclesiastes 3:11
So if you are the friend who keeps arguing, keep arguing. God is not offended by your questions. He is not standing at the door tapping his foot waiting for you to get it together.
And if you are the friend on the other side of that conversation, the Tolkien in somebody's life, keep showing up. Keep walking. You are probably not going to win it with a great line. Lewis did not fold because Tolkien out-argued him. He folded because somebody who loved him would not quit talking to him about the thing that mattered most.
Two years of stubbornness, one long walk, and a ride to the zoo in a sidecar.
God is not in a hurry, and he is not going anywhere.