My parents eventually bought me the boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia. I was a slow reader, but gradually I devoured each book. Prince Caspian was perhaps my favorite at that time-partly because of the battle scene where a Telmarine head gets walloped off.

I don't recall just when some of the Christian overtones in The Chronicles became clear to me. I'm sure that at first I just loved the books because they were wonderful stories. And that is as it should be.

When I was in junior high school a beloved aunt made a Christmas present to me of The Joyful Christian: 127 Readings from C. S. Lewis. The snippets in that book, along with reading bits of Francis Schaeffer, began to answer some spiritual questions I had at the time: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? What is the purpose of life? How can I know there is a God? And if there is a God, what is He really like?

By high school I had become involved in church and I had a very wise youth pastor who challenged his students to read, not only the Bible, but Christian literature as well. Among the books we were encouraged to read were the adult fiction and nonfiction works of C. S. Lewis. So I began to read more of this man whose land of Narnia I had come to love. However, the books I assayed at that time (Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters among them) were a bit daunting, just as a climb to the summit of Everest might be a tad overwhelming to someone who had only hiked the Blue Ridge.

A couple of years further on a friend handed me her old paperback copy of The Pilgrim's Regress. The experience that Lewis's pilgrim had in the book, the experience of desire, longing, what the German's call sehnsucht, was a feeling I was familiar with. As we all do, I was trying at that time in my life to salve the ache in my heart with that which would not soothe. Lewis showed me, what Augustine had pointed out hundreds of years before - "The heart is restless until it finds its rest in Thee."

Around the same time I also read The Great Divorce. In the character of the mother who clung to her dead son and the man with the lizard of lust on his shoulder I saw mirror images of myself. Lewis revealed to me that by clinging to my false gods I was inhibiting a freeing encounter with the true God.

By now I was truly hooked on Lewis. The themes he explored most deeply in his books were the very undercurrents of my life. And so, during my college years, I traveled on a lone pilgrimage to England and Ireland with all the Lewis books in tow that I had not yet read. I wanted to see where Lewis had lived and taught and walked the hills of that "green and pleasant land". I longed to capture, as if I could, the spirit of Lewis and the muse of Oxford, the dreaming spires.

I read Miracles while lying upon one of those perfectly manicured Oxford lawns, sinking my bare feet into the luxurious, bright green grass, close-by to Addison's Walk and the River Cherwell. Fifty years before Lewis had walked there one windy September night with Hugo Dyson and J. R. R. Tolkien by his side. They talked of myth and myth become fact in Jesus Christ. It was a memorable talk which led, in short order, to Lewis's re-conversion to Christian faith.

While in Oxford I also went in search of Lewis's former home, The Kilns. Now you must understand that in those days, twenty some years ago, Lewis was not much remembered in Oxford. And so I had to do my own detective work in order to find the various sites associated with Lewis's life. A long walk, I'm sure down various wrong roads and back again, eventually led to Kiln Lane, then Lewis Close, and finally The Kilns itself. Brash young American that I was, camera slung over my shoulder, I trooped right up to the kitchen door, the one closest to the road, and rang the bell. A Professor Thirsk, then owner of The Kilns, answered. I introduced myself as an American fan of Lewis and asked if I could possibly see the house, if it wouldn't be too much trouble. Mr Thirsk, in typical genteel, English, professorial manner said that I could walk round the outside of the house and take as many photos as I wished!

The house was a bit run-down. As I peeked through some of the windows I wondered if, as in Lewis's time, the house wasn't in fact held up by the multitude of shelves in every room, loaded from floor to ceiling with books. Since that time the Kilns has been bought and lovingly restored to 1950's vintage by the C. S. Lewis Foundation of Redlands, California.

In my mind's eye I can still picture another part of that same trip-crossing the Irish Sea by ferry-the brisk, salt air blowing in my face, sunlight dancing on the waves, lying on a top-deck bench reading Till We Have Faces. Lewis himself crossed the Irish Sea many a time by ferry with his brother while they were still young boys, traveling to boarding school in England from their home in Belfast. Till We Have Faces, in its re-working of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, continued to paint for me a picture of the corruption of affection, a portrait of which Lewis had drawn the outline sketch in The Great Divorce and The Pilgrim's Regress.

On that memorable trip in 1982 I traveled by train from Dublin to Donegal, situated on the northwest coast of Ireland. Somewhere near our destination the ruins of a castle perched on a seaside cliff came into view. Was it the inspiration for Cair Paravel? No one knows. But Donegal was one of Lewis's favorite places to go on holiday and undoubtedly the landscape of Ireland imbued the geography of Narnia with its vivid colors, the smell of salt-air and the taste of fresh fish.

I became infected with some sort of virus en-route to Donegal and so spent most of my time there in bed. My room in a wayside inn with uneven stairs, down the lane from Donegal Castle, felt about twice the size of a postage stamp. Unable to do anything else, I laid in bed for one or two days, reading, and reading and reading some more, while the floodgates of heaven opened outside my window and drenched the rich farmland of Ireland with the nutrients that make that fair country so incomparably green. It was in Donegal that I finished reading, and began to understand for the first time, Mere Christianity. By the time I reached the chapter on The Shocking Alternative my mind was convinced that Jesus of Nazareth really was who He had claimed to be. Though my pilgrimage to the British Isles lasted a week more, Donegal and Mere Christianity joined to make the climax.

Lewis's writings continued to be a great encouragement to me a few years later in seminary as I prepared for a vocation to Christian ministry. Upon re-reading The Great Divorce I had to chuckle upon reading Lewis's description of certain German theologians, who, given a choice between two doors-one marked "Heaven" and the other marked "Discussion of Heaven"-chose the latter. I didn't want to make that mistake, and in fact, reading Lewis's work over the years had filled me with a hunger for Heaven that nothing else could satisfy.

While in seminary I also met my wife. The first test of friendship and of potential romance was a private showing of the BBC version of Shadowlands in her parents' basement. She passed the test and we are still together seventeen years later!

Eventually just reading Lewis wasn't enough; I wanted to discuss his life and works with others and write about Lewis's thought. And so, over the intervening years I have formed Lewis Societies in some of the locations where I have lived. I have corresponded with former friends of Lewis such as the late Sheldon Vanauken of Lynchburg. And over the course of seven years I wrote Mere Theology: A Guide to the Thought of C. S. Lewis, published last year by InterVarsity Press.

Wanting to learn more about Lewis, the man, led to e-mail correspondence with Douglas Gresham, Lewis's step-son, several years ago. That initial correspondence led to the formation of a Lewis Tour to England and a merry meeting with Doug in Oxford. A year later we brought Doug across the pond to speak at our church for a Lewis Weekend. The friendship deepened and so we found ourselves crossing the Atlantic again to spend a week with Doug and his wife Merrie at their home, Rathvinden House, in Ireland. That year also saw my first visit to Northern Ireland and Lewis's boyhood home, Little Lea, as well as a wedding performed for friends on one of the vast lawns of the Gresham home. Learning more of the Gresham's ministry of counseling, hospitality and evangelism finally led my wife and I to take a much needed sabbatical and join in the Gresham's work for the better part of 2004. Appropriately enough, my family lived that year in a 400-year-old house known as The Narnia Cottage.

And so my spiritual journey with C. S. Lewis has come full circle, in a way. Who could have predicted what doors of the spirit a teacher was opening for one nine-year-old boy in 1972 when she read to a group of fourth-graders about the Pevensie children's adventure through a wardrobe?