Will Vaus

I led a C. S. Lewis Tour of Ireland and England from August 14 to 26, 2016. We hope to do this tour again in 2018. So if you find the photos from our tour intriguing, please stay in touch. Our tour operator was Russ Head of the  Travel Connection . We began our tour in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where we stayed in the Jury's Inn, right in the center of town, across the street from the headquarters of the Presbyterian Church (pictured above). Our walking tour of central Belfast included a stop at Writers' Square where C. S. Lewis is remembered with this paving stone. Sadly, Cair Paravel is misspelled.  We ventured on with our guide, Sandy Smith, to Lewis' birthplace. Here is a video piece with Sandy.... From Lewis' birthplace we travelled on a short distance to Lewis' childhood home, Little Lea. The brilliant sunlight that day provided quite a contrast to this house which Lewis himself said was "much suffered in". It was here, at th...

When we first moved to Monterey, Virginia, a friend loaned me his bicycle and I began riding, something I hadn’t done for many years. It was hard at first, but eventually I worked up to doing the 25 mile ride in the Mountain Mama Bike Challenge. It felt great, getting out and enjoying that kind of exercise which I hadn’t experienced for years. Then the following summer I got the bike out again. Man, was it hard! I thought: “What’s wrong? I was doing so well at the end of last summer.” The problem was I hadn’t cycled for about nine months. My muscles weren’t prepared to take on the kind of exercise I’d been doing the summer before. I needed to work into it slowly. What is true of physical muscle is also true of spiritual muscle. Muscles that aren’t used atrophy. Today we are going to read about what Jesus, Peter, James and John encountered after they came down from the Mount of Transfiguration—when they came down into the valley. Here they encounter a father who has brought h...

Of course, one of the recurrent themes in the book of Acts has to do with  the power of the Holy Spirit . In our reading for today, we came across these verses.... “The apostles performed many miraculous signs and wonders among the people. . . . As a result, people brought the sick into the streets and laid them on beds and mats so that at least Peter’s shadow might fall on some of them as he passed by. Crowds gathered also from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing their sick and those tormented by evil spirits, and all of them were healed.” Perhaps if we recovered more of the power of the Holy Spirit in our own day then more people would be attracted to the church. C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman, the woman who became Lewis’s wife, had such an unusual relationship that a movie was made about them called Shadowlands . Davidman was a secular American Jewish woman who was led to faith in Christ partly through reading Lewis’s books. She wrote to Lewis in Engl...

One main thought occurred to me as I read these four psalms of David today. If David had not gone through such difficult times in his life, and if he had not written down his thoughts and prayers during these challenging times, countless people would be bereft of one of the greatest sources of comfort that has been known through literature over the past three thousand years. Perhaps this should be an encouragement to us, that God can use our painful experiences to bring comfort to others as well. These psalms should also serve as an invitation to us to write down our thoughts and prayers as we may travel through the valley of the shadow. Writing can be a very healing exercise. C. S. Lewis discovered this in his life. He once said that ink was like a drug to him. Writing helped him to cope—especially when he went through the tortuous ordeal of losing his wife to cancer. God has used Lewis’ journal from that painful time in his life to help an untold number of pe...

In celebration of the Fourth of July I am reading the letters of C. S. Lewis's American wife, Joy Davidman (edited by my friend Don King). These letters, along with King's brief and incisive commentary along the way, are a real treat. While I was in Oxford last week I got to see the former Register Office (42 St Giles) where Lewis and Davidman were married in a civil ceremony on April 23, 1956: I also walked by Joy's former home at 10 Old High Street, Headington: And here is an old photo of mine showing Joy's memorial at the Oxford Crematorium with poem by C. S. Lewis: And Douglas Gresham viewing his mother's memorial plaque in 1997:

On 5 August 1960 C. S. Lewis wrote to a correspondent: "I believe in the resurrection, and also (rather less confidently) in the natural immortality of the soul. But the state of the dead till the resurrection is unimaginable. Are they in the same time that we live in at all. And if not, is there any sense in asking what they are 'now'?" Collected Letters , Volume III, p. 1177 It should not be surprising that C. S. Lewis found the state of the blessed dead until the resurrection to be unimaginable. After all, the Bible doesn't say much about it. Certainly the presence of the souls of the blessed dead with Christ is assured by such verses as these: "I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise." Luke 23:43 "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepar...

On 14 June 1960, just one month before his wife's death, C. S. Lewis wrote to Peter Bide, the priest who had performed Lewis's death-bed wedding ceremony and who had layed hands on Joy for healing. Bide's own wife had just been diagnosed with cancer. Lewis wrote: "Joy says (do you agree?) that we needn't be too afraid of questionings and expostulations: it was the impatience of Job not the theodicies of Elihu that were pleasing to God. Does He like us to 'stand up to Him' a bit? Certainly He cannot like mere flattery -- resentment masquerading as submission thru' fear. "How impossible it wd. be now to face it without rage if God Himself had not shared the horrors of the world He made!" Collected Letters, Volume III, p. 1161 The phrase, the patience of Job , is based upon a poor translation of James 5:11. A better translation reads as follows: "As you know, we consider blessed those who have persevered. You have heard of Job'...

On April 10, 1959 C. S. Lewis wrote to a woman correspondent in order to comfort her in the midst of a trial she was undergoing. Lewis wrote poignantly out of his own experience of suffering. . . . "My heart goes out to you. You are now just where I was a little over two years ago -- they wrongly diagnosed Joy's condition as Uremia before they discovered cancer of the bone. "I know all the different ways in which it gets one: wild hopes, bitter nostalgia for lost happiness, mere physical terror turning one sick, agonised pity and self-pity. In fact, Gethsemane. I had one (paradoxical) support which you lack -- that of being in severe pain myself. Apart from that what helped Joy and me through it was That she was always told the whole truth about her own state. There was no miserable pretence. That means that both can face it side-by-side, instead of becoming something like adversaries in a battle-of-wits. Take it day by day and hour by hour (as we took the front ...