The Way and ‘Not-the-way’

Somebody has said, ‘There is only one sickness, and that is homesickness.’  Whether modern man knows it or not, that is his chief sickness – he is Home-sick.  He knows that he has one foot in time and another in eternity, and he doesn’t feel at home in either one.  He is afraid of both.  He is afraid because he can’t put these two together and make them come out as sense.  His sums don’t add up.  Something is basically wrong. (E. Stanley Jones, The Way, 1946)

E. Stanley Jones is one of my literary mentors (who died in 1973).  He served 50 years in India, was an evangelist to the world who Time magazine called second to Billy Graham, and worked passionately as an ambassador of peace.   His writings were filled with the confidence that the Christian Way was THE way – not just theoretically,  but by experience.  He would say this with a hundred different vivid examples.  Here is a sample:

There is “the way” and “not the way.”  In chemistry H2O produces water.  You may fight with the formula and try to twist it into something else, but in the end you will surrender to it, accept  it, obey it, or you will not produced water…There is the way to fly, and there is not-the-way.  Aviators tell us that every day they must obey those laws upon which flying depends – or else!  There can be no moral holidays in the air.  You obey or break.  Aviation did not invent those laws or impose them; it discovered them.

The Jesus Way fits life as it is and as it was meant to be.  I don’t have all the answers in this fallen and complicated world, but I am more convinced every day, that I am on THE Way!