After Death in Family,
How God Used C.S. Lewis and U2 to Bring Healing
After Death in the Family, How God Used C.S. Lewis and U2 to Bring Healing

Kevin Ott - Editor and Writer for Rocking God's House (small)This article is a new version of a recent post on my author blog Stabs of Joy.

In 2010 I experienced an unexpected tragedy — a loss in my family — and it was devastating. I lost my mom. And she was still young by today’s life expectancy standards — just in her early 60s.

The sorrow from it all exposed some things. It made me realize something important: I could talk the talk all the day about Christian joy, but I really wasn’t experiencing Christian joy.

I asked God to change that. I asked Him to fix me.

And He did.

God saw fit to use a few souls birthed on the Emerald Isle to help accomplish the job: a stack of books by the Belfast-born C.S. Lewis and a large pile of albums by the Dublin-raised band U2 (#U2, #U2Fans).

Among a multitude of things, I learned that joy — real joy, the eternal kind — is not happiness perfected. Joy is hunger perfected — hunger for God perfected, to be more accurate.

As C.S. Lewis (#CSLewis) pointed out, joy is an unsatisfied desire — an intense desire — that is itself more desirable than any satisfaction.

Joy stabs us when we least expect it. It’s not something we control. It’s not dependent upon earthly circumstances — i.e. if things are “going well.”

Joy is something external to us that invades our senses. It uses common, everyday experiences, objects, and nostalgic memories to overwhelm us with a sudden sensation of longing for something — but for what? We don’t know. We just feel the longing, and it is a sweet sensation.

Just the sensation of that spiritual hunger — this longing — is more wonderful than any earthly satisfaction.

It’s hunger for the Fount of Joy — the Living God who made all things good.

Check out Stabs of Joy where I will be exploring dozens of C.S. Lewis books and U2 albums to answer one question: how do we actually experience (and not just talk about) the joy of Christ in the middle of painful trials?