I’ve never been much of a sentimental guy. But I also haven’t had much to miss until recently. A year out of college and into the work force will make you think about everything that’s worked to define you over the past 23 years.

It still catches me off guard when I think how I spent those first 23 years impatiently anticipating their demise so that they might make room for the rest of my life with all its freedoms, responsibilities, titles, and significance. Now that those years are finally here, I find my mind retreating every so often to places, memories, and people from the past that can never be replicated.

As another summer slips into oblivion and a new season rushes in, I take stock of all the “misses” I’ve experienced this year. I’ve missed a woman. I’ve missed the clutter of a crowded dorm room. I’ve missed Innocence, which seems to smell faintly like burnt charcoal and occasionally takes on the color of grass stains. 

I think these notions are directly related to our quest to know God and be known by Him. To get glory, to see heaven, to inhale eternity. For so long my idea of heaven seemed, frankly, boring – a selfless, sexless, worship service that lasted for eternity with the occasional weird looking winged creature flying around to keep my mind occupied. It wasn’t until reading the words of C.S. Lewis in his book, The Weight of Glory,  that I began to think differently:

We usually notice it just as the moment of vision dies away, as the music ends or as the landscape loses the celestial light. What we feel then has been well described by Keats as “the journey homeward to habitual self.” You know what I mean. For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken into the dance. We may go when we please, we may stay if we can: “Nobody marks us.” A scientist may reply that since most of the things we call beautiful are inanimate, it is not very surprising that they take no notice of us. That, of course, is true. It is not the physical objects that I am speaking of, but that indescribable something of which they become for a moment the messengers. And part of the bitterness which mixes with the sweetness of that message is due to the fact that it so seldom seems to be a message intended for us but rather something we have overheard. By bitterness I mean pain, not resentment. We should hardly dare to ask that any notice be taken of ourselves. But we pine. The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory meant good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.

Could it be the things that mark us as humans – nostalgia, desire, significance, the stuff that people deal with in reality, have been instilled in us by the Creator FOR The Creator? Could it be that heaven is less like the Magic Kingdom and more like the satisfaction of what we just can’t seem to stop longing for here on earth?  Too often I settle for flannelgraph depictions and forget that redemption is for real life. That the God who created space, stars, and seraphim also cares about what’s going on here on earth down to the microscopic soul. When thinking about your own life and the lives of people around you let the truth that God’s redemption is for today not just for eternity change everything about the way you live. Just some thoughts from a guy waking up to this stuff.