There Are No Ordinary People

I get a deep satisfaction looking back on my life and seeing how the story has unfolded to this point. This isn’t because I’ve done everything correctly—or even well. Far from it.

I’ve fallen into sin. I’ve been humiliated. I’ve faced challenges that I thought would destroy me.

The satisfaction comes from something else entirely: seeing how God has been present in every moment, teaching and shaping me into the man He desires me to be. Even in failure, He has given me consolations, friendships, stories, and mentors that kept me moving forward.

During one of my darkest seasons, I was introduced to one of those mentors: C. S. Lewis.

Losing — and Being Rebuilt

In a rather arrogant moment in my life, I joined an atheist/theist discussion group. I believed I knew my faith well enough to dismantle their arguments. So I engaged. I debated. And I lost.

Each argument chipped away at my confidence. I began questioning my faith—and eventually, God Himself. I didn’t have answers to the problem of pain or how we could know that God truly is who He claims to be. I felt lost and exposed.

Humiliated and searching, I began listening to Lewis while cleaning AC units on rooftops.

I listened to Mere Christianity and felt as though everything was clicking into place. Of course, there was a God—and of course He would be a Trinity.

The Problem of Pain gave me answers I didn’t know how to articulate.
The Great Divorce showed me how people could choose their own hell while refusing heaven.

Slowly, I was being rebuilt.

Encountering The Weight of Glory

When I thought I had exhausted Lewis’s writings, I stumbled upon a collection of his essays. I didn’t expect much—but The Weight of Glory changed how I saw the world.

Two ideas in that essay seized me.

The first was what the Bible means by glory, which I will address in another newsletter.

The second was the reality of every human being.
That second truth changed how I look at others.

There Are No Ordinary People

In daily life, we interact with countless people—often without giving them much thought. We have an objective, a task, or a goal. Once it’s completed, we move on. Even with family and friends, much of life runs on habit and utility.

Lewis interrupts that way of seeing with these words:

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals when we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.

Living With Eternity in View

Lewis wrote many great things, but this insight may be among his most useful. His other works helped rebuild my understanding of God. This one gave me a reason to live differently.

Life isn’t just about us. Yes, our own salvation matters—but so does the salvation of others.

Every person we encounter will exist forever.

Many of us would say, “Yes, I know that.” But do we really? Does that truth shape how we speak, how we forgive, how we act when no one is watching?

Lewis presses us to recognize that nothing we do is weightless. Every word and every action carries eternal consequences. Our choices influence not only our own trajectory but the lives of those around us.

The way I speak to my wife and children matters eternally.
So does the way I treat a stranger.

Nothing we do is weightless.

A Clarification

After pressing this burden upon us, Lewis adds a crucial clarification:

This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.

God does not ask us to withdraw from life. He calls us to act, to build, to explore, and to grow. We see this in the parable of the talents. Life is filled with possibilities.

But we must never forget who we are living among.

Take time this week to let this truth sink in.

How might seeing others as eternal beings change the way you speak, act, or forgive today?

Forge Ahead

Anvil: the place of formation.
Arrow: the mission we’re sent on.

The world needs more men formed in virtue.
Forward this to a brother who’s ready to grow.

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Access The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis by Clicking Here