In this life, we avoid a lot of battles because we spend a lot of time trying to calculate wether or not we will win them. C.S. Lewis paints this picture very well in his children’s book called Prince Caspian. The boy-king Peter has challenged an enemy adult-king, named Miraz, in hand-to-hand combat. Just before entering the sword-fighting area, Peter’s brother Edmund has a short conversation with him.
“I say,” said Edmund as they walked, “I suppose it is all right. I mean, I suppose you can beat him?”
“That’s what I’m fighting to find out,” said Peter.
If Peter had tried to calculate whether or not he could win before fighting the adult-king Miraz, then he never would have entered the fight in the first place. C.S. Lewis is trying to point out that most often the only way we will know if we can win a battle is if we fight them to find out.
In my life, I’ve spent a lot of time fighting over who is right and who is wrong. I’ve fought for what I thought was justice, when in fact it has often been a fight to display my correctness and their wrongness.
Today, I still fall into this pattern; however, I know it isn’t what Lewis is really talking about here. Yes, we fight against injustices, true injustices to be sure, but these aren’t the greatest sorts of battles. The greatest sorts of battles are honesty, authenticity, vulnerability, repentance, knowing and being known by using our voice or by truly listening, setting or expanding boundaries where needed, communicating with loved ones and others in a direct manner, forgiveness, loving the unloveable, and entering into the unknowns of relationships both current ones and opportunities for new ones.
Our greatest fear in fighting these sorts of battles is the uncertainty of the future. What will happen? Will we be harmed? Will we lose what we have? Will we be overtaken? Will we be mocked or disrespected? Will we fail others or will they fail us?
The only way we can know if we can win these battles is to walk into them. It is completely counter-intuitive. To be vulnerable, repentant, or forgiving (among the others listed above) are some of scariest battles we can ever embark upon.
Nevertheless, I think I find out more and more that as I enter these battles, the fact that I have entered them is where I have already won. Had Peter entered this sword-fight with the adult-king and lost, he still would have won in a certain sort of way by virtue of the fact that he entered the fight in the first place.