What Elwin Ransom of Cambridge Would Do

I’ve been reading C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra of late. In all of our discussion about movement building, we’ve emphasized–rightly–the role of community and teams. Yet, reading this I was challenged again about my role as an individual Christ-follower with important decisions and commitments to make. Do I commit to following Christ? Will I connect with the lost? Will I disciple others? Will I launch movements?

If you’re not familiar with the story, Ransom is the hero sent to Perelandra (Venus) to save the Lady from the temptation to reject the good commands of Maledil (God). It’s C.S. Lewis’s re-telling of Genesis 3 and the Fall–with a different result–thanks to what Elwin Ransom would do.

His journey to Perelandra was not a moral exercise, nor a sham fight. If the issue lay in Maleldil’s hands, Ransom and the Lady were those hands. The fate of a world really depended on how they behaved in the next few hours. …
The voluble self protested, wildly, swiftly, like the propeller of a ship racing when it is out of the water. The imprudence, the unfairness, the absurdity of it! Did Maleldil want to lose worlds? What was the sense of so arranging things that anything really important should finally and absolutely depend on such a man of straw as himself? And at that moment, far away on Earth, as he now could not help remembering, men were at war, and white-faced subalterns and freckled corporals who had but lately begun to shave, stood in horrible gaps or crawled forward in deadly darkness, awaking, like him, to the preposterous truth that all really depended on their actions; and far away in time, Horatious stood on the bridge, and Constantine settled in his mind whether he would or would not embrace the new religion, and Eve herself stood looking upon the forbidden fruit and the Heaven of Heavens waited for her decision. He writhed and ground his teeth, but could not help seeing. Thus and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices. And if something, who could set bounds to it? A stone may determine the course of a river. He was that stone at this horrible moment which had become the centre of the whole universe. The eldila of all worlds, the sinless organisms of everlasting light, were silent in Deep Heaven to see what Elwin Ransom of Cambridge would do.

C. S. Lewis in Perelandra