“The wind blows where it wishes.
You hear its sound, but you do not know
where it comes from or where it is going.
So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
John 3:8
BSB
Surprised By Joy
I was at a concert in Glasgow this week, and it was pleasant to hear Alistair Begg back in his hometown to say a few words. Apart from the stunning performance of the singers and musicians, Irish dancers and the generous spirit of the audience, I found myself travelling home on the train preoccupied with what Alistair had said. The city, the big wheel at Glasgow Green, the Gorbals and Lochwinnoch slipped past the windows, his words remained.
I had read them before, but this time they struck me with greater force, as though they had been waiting for a different moment in my life to be heard.
They were taken from Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, C. S. Lewis’s account of his reluctant and often resistant journey toward Christian faith. Lewis describes a moment that is remarkable not for its drama, but for its ordinariness:
“I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo, I did.”
Lewis is careful to insist that this was not the result of an argument won or an emotion stirred. There was no thunderclap, no surge of feeling. He writes that it was more like the quiet realization of wakefulness after sleep — the sudden, unmistakable awareness that one is awake, though nothing outward has changed. Faith, for Lewis, arrived not as a spectacle but as a recognition.
The context matters. Lewis had spent years thinking, reading, resisting. He was a scholar, suspicious of sentimentality, wary of religious experience. And yet, belief did not finally come to him through effort or reasoning alone. It came, almost unnoticed, in the middle of an ordinary journey, as if something long at work had at last reached its moment.
What struck me most profoundly this time was how this quiet awakening echoes the testimonies of believers in places where Christianity cannot be preached openly — in North Korea, Afghanistan, China, and elsewhere. I have read accounts of people who had never held a Bible, never attended a church, never heard a sermon — and yet who speak of Christ appearing to them in dreams. They wake, like Lewis, to a reality they did not possess the night before.
There is no zoo, no concert hall, no public witness. And yet, there is awakening.
I find myself marvelling at the way the Holy Spirit works — not bound by geography, permission, or circumstance. Sometimes through long reflection, sometimes through a dream, sometimes on a train journey home. Not always loudly. Not always dramatically. But unmistakably.
And perhaps that is the most unsettling and hopeful truth of all: that faith may come upon us not when we are searching for it, but when, at last, we are awake enough to recognize it.
“The wind blows where it wishes. You hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
John 3:8
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