— The Lamp Within —

January 1, 2026

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

C.S. Lewis

About the Author

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) was born in Belfast, Ireland, the son of a lawyer and a mathematician’s daughter. He lost his mother to cancer when he was nine — a wound he carried quietly for decades. He fought in the trenches of World War I, was wounded at the Battle of Arras, and went on to become one of the most celebrated literary scholars and Christian thinkers of the twentieth century, holding chairs at both Oxford and Cambridge.
Lewis was a lifelong atheist who, after years of resistance and rigorous intellectual wrestling, converted to Christianity in his early thirties. He went on to write Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Problem of Pain. He married Joy Davidman late in life — in his late fifties — and found in her a love he had never expected. When she died of cancer just four years later, he wrote A Grief Observed, so raw and unguarded was his sorrow.
He was not a man who had life handed to him easily. He was a man who kept beginning again.

Historical Context

Lewis wrote and spoke during one of history’s most disorienting eras — the collapse of European confidence after two World Wars, the rise of secularism, and the quiet erosion of faith in public life. His famous Inklings group — which included J.R.R. Tolkien — met weekly at an Oxford pub to read manuscripts aloud, challenge one another, and refuse the idea that meaning had gone out of the world. These were middle-aged men, many scarred by war, who kept dreaming.
Lewis himself began The Chronicles of Narnia series at age fifty. He wrote Mere Christianity from wartime BBC radio broadcasts delivered to a nation in fear. He never stopped starting. The line he gave us — you are never too old — was not a motivational sentiment. It was testimony. It is what the evidence of his own life required him to say.

Scripture Cross-Links

Isaiah 40:31 — “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”
Ether 12:4 — “Wherefore, whoso believeth in God might with surety hope for a better world… which hope cometh of faith, maketh an anchor to the souls of men.”
Doctrine and Covenants 58:27–28 — “Men should be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of their own free will… For the power is in them, wherein they are agents unto themselves.”
Moses 1:39 — “For behold, this is my work and my glory — to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.”

Thematic Reflection

There is a quiet lie that whispers to us as we age — that the season for dreaming has passed. That dreams belong to the young, to those with unspent years and uncalloused hands. We begin to speak of what we used to hope for, as though hope itself has an expiration date.
To set a goal is an act of faith. It says: I believe the future is real, and that I have a role in it. To dream a new dream is an act of hope — perhaps the purest kind, because it asks nothing of the past. It only asks: What is still possible?
Lewis answered that question at fifty, at fifty-eight, at sixty-four. The answer was always the same: more than you think. You are never too old. You are never too broken. You are never too late.
Begin again.

Richard’s Personal Reflection

I began writing this book in my seventies. That fact alone felt like an answer to Lewis’s challenge — and a small rebuke to the part of me that had whispered, Is it too late for something like this?
Thirty years of medicine taught me to recognize when a patient had stopped dreaming. It was not always visible in their chart. It showed up in the eyes — a particular flatness, an absence of forward lean. I found, in time, that the patients who held onto some small hope, some project, some reason to see tomorrow, healed differently. Not always faster, but differently — with more dignity, more quiet fight. Hope has a physiology that we can measure and one that we cannot.
I do not know how many January firsts lie ahead of me. But I know what I intend to do with them. I intend to keep setting goals and dreaming new dreams — for my family, for this book, for the grandchildren whose names I sometimes say aloud just to remember how good they sound.
If you are reading this and wondering whether the season for your dreaming has passed — it has not. Lewis would tell you so. I would tell you so. And the God who made you would tell you so most of all.

Grandfather’s Counsel

I have watched people stop dreaming long before they stopped living — and I have watched the light go out of them when they did. Do not let that happen to you.
You are never finished. There is always a next chapter, a new horizon, something worth reaching for. The day you decide the dreaming is over is the day you begin to diminish. I have seen it in exam rooms, and I have seen it in living rooms, and I do not want to see it in you.
I am still dreaming. I started this book as one of those dreams. I hope you always will be too — dreaming, reaching, beginning again on every January first and every ordinary Tuesday that follows it.