“The Christian says, ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or to be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that country and to help others to do the same.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
I have a confession.
The day after Thanksgiving, I lay in bed and wept.
I longed to close my eyes and never wake up.
Some days are like that in grief. They’re hard. Achingly painful. Raw.
There are longings in our souls that can only be fulfilled in God. That is one thing that grief has given me. A dissatisfaction with everything this world has to offer…even the good things were never meant to give us that full, beautiful satisfaction that we’re all craving, deep in our hearts.
So, I press on toward my heavenly home. Even if sometimes, I don’t want to wake up. I let grief do its work in me. And I run to the rock that is higher than I.
I remember who it is that I worship, and where I’m going.
I heard a talk recently by Joni Eareckson Tada. She spoke about suffering. She said that Samuel Rutherford, a Scottish Presbyterian pastor and theologian expressed it this way…
“If God had told me some time ago that He was about to make me as happy as I could be in this world, and then had told me that He should begin by crippling all my limbs, and removing me from all my usual sources of enjoyment, I should have thought it a very strange mode of accomplishing His purpose. And yet, how is His wisdom manifest even in this! For if you should see a man shut up in a close room, idolizing a set of lamps and rejoicing in their light, and you wished to make him truly happy, you would begin by blowing out all his lamps; and then throw open the shutters to let in the light of heaven.”
Joni then went on to say that before suffering came into her life, she had “never really thought much about it. It was vague and hazy and distant. Who wants to think much about heaven? You have to die in order to get there! But when God brought suffering my way, he blew out all my lamps that made this life so alluring and planted in my heart a desire for heaven!…Our suffering prepares us for such a glory…soon our songs of suffering will be over. But our song of Christ’s suffering will go on forever and ever. We will never tire of singing how his suffering and death secured for us such happy delights and pleasures! If our happiest moments on earth are a foretaste of heaven, it is our most tragic moments on earth that make us long for it and yearn for it”
The brilliancy of stars can be most clearly seen on the darkest of nights.
It is in the darkness that we long for the beauty of the light and my greatest hunger for heaven has come through suffering.
Sorrow and joy. They live side by side in our hearts. The painful ache that often floods the soul is so closely tied to the glories and beauties and joys of our future home. I long for heaven now with a heart that is filled with pain, yes. But there’s something deeper in me now. There is a wonder in the beauty of Christ that is only made truer through suffering.
He has blown out my lamps. But he has also thrown open the shutters!