Instant Cherry Pie and Gold Dollar Coin Society

              Recently, I have been reading a spectacularly fantastic book by C.S. Lewis called THE WEIGHT OF GLORY !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and what I mean by recently is I bought the book two years ago and have been reading it ever since. Sometimes it just sits on my shelf for months other times it lays in my hands as I flip slowly through the pages. Well the other day -somehow- it ended up in my book bag. 

              So as I sat at my desk, trying hard to not listen in on other peoples conversations, I decided to read. The next chapter in the book just so happened to be 'The Inner Ring'.

           As I sat there at my desk surrounded by classmates, I got lost in the words of this great theologian. Whether we are in them or admiring them from the outside, Inner Rings are all around us. No matter how pointless or troublesome an Inner Ring may be, we strive and consider it a privilege to be in them.

              In one part Lewis writes " 'Charles and I saw at once that you've got to be on this committee.' A terrible bore... ah, but how much more terrible if you were left out! It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons but to have them free because you don't matter, that is much worse."

              We see so often the affects of the Inner Ring. My father and brothers often talk of their work place and for the longest time I never understood why! It seemed so boring and pointless to talk about work at the dinner table. Alas, now I understand. It isn't really pointless chatter at all! Every small piece of information which passes between these men has deep significant meaning to it. Perhaps it does not matter to them that no one else cares, why should they? It is not they that are so intimately Involved with this Inner Ring, known as Lake City.

                 To be involved in an Inner Ring means some form of importance. You know the feeling. Let's say you're on the decorating committee at church, and on one Saturday afternoon no one can find the green ribbon that wraps around the banister. How fickle this seems to the custodian whose cleaning the loo, or the secretary who came to unlock the door, but to all on the committee it is a great matter of importance... Indeed, indeed it is so important.

                  You can sign up to be on the decorating committee, you can get a job at Lake City, or you can sit by some one in class and still be excluded from an Inner Ring. It takes hard work, effort, and commitment, to get in any Inner Ring. Even after you've acheived all that, you may find yourself stretched, shrunk, wiggled, and pushed till you've finally conformed to the empty space within the Inner Ring. Once there I challenge you to ask this question 'Am I content here?' 

                   Yet, Lewis points out another matter of much importance. "The difference is that its secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric, for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it."

                    There is a difference between friendship and Inner Rings. No one will ever stretch, shrink, wiggle, or conform to fit in a friendship. One shouldn't have to! I challenge you to notice these Inner Rings that surround us, flee from them, and strive for friendships instead.