By Joe Byerly
They checked the news first thing in the morning. Then again at lunch. Then one more time before bed. They waited for life to return to something that felt recognizable. It was hard to believe that leaders could be so casually selfish—treating the lives of entire groups of people as raw material for an ideology. Gradually, the work in front of them began to feel smaller. Easier to postpone. And more often than not, they caught themselves wondering why what they were doing mattered, when the world seemed to be falling apart.
Those were the stressors that wouldn’t go away, and the question they carried with them, as they stepped into an almost 700-year-old church on a Sunday morning in October 1939 to hear a forty-year-old Oxford professor named C.S. Lewis address the students sitting shoulder to shoulder in the wooden pews.
Over the course of his sermon, he spoke to them about war, uncertainty, fear, and the temptation to put their lives on hold until the world made sense again. He spoke about the danger of postponing meaningful work while waiting for better days.
“If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work,” Lewis told them. “The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.”
He was right. Favorable conditions never come.
And as Joseph Loconte points out in The War for Middle-Earth (and our interview), if Lewis—or one of his closest friends, J.R.R. Tolkien—had waited for conditions to improve, the world might never have received their gifts: The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings.
The headlines didn’t improve. But they shared their gifts anyway.
It’s easy to get sucked into our social media feeds, glued to our TVs, trapped in a perpetual state of pissed off. Meanwhile, we forget that we’re supposed to be doing our work — the work in front of us, whether that’s our 9-to-5, our family, our craft, or something we’re quietly building on the side. The thing each of us was put here to do. The gift each of us was meant to bring into the world.
Favorable conditions never come.
But we share our gifts anyway.
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Joe Byerly is a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel with 20 years of service, including tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and command of a cavalry squadron in Europe. He earned numerous prestigious awards, including multiple Legion of Merits, Bronze Stars, the Purple Heart, and General Douglas MacArthur Leadership Award. In 2013, Joe founded From the Green Notebook.
A passionate advocate for self-knowledge through reading and reflection, he authored The Leader’s 90-Day Notebook and co-authored My Green Notebook: “Know Thyself” Before Changing Jobs, a resource for leaders seeking greater self-awareness. If this post resonated with you or sparked any questions, feel free to reach out to him at Joe@fromthegreennotebook.com.
