Perhaps you would have laughed, peering into my kitchen last Friday afternoon. There was the pot of soup simmering on the stove, the challah rising forgotten in a bowl, the mop bucket, the grubby floor…
and the pealing bells and pomp of a royal wedding playing out live, just on the other side of the sea.
All the good things about this particular wedding made it piercingly beautiful. It reminded me of heaven, shattered that reminder with its humanness, then hinted at heaven once more. With all that almost-ness, I could have come away cynical, or infatuated, or both. (And perhaps I did).
But I’m mindful of what C.S. Lewis described as “our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off…”
All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work.
It is the longing “to find the place where all the beauty came from—my country, the place where I ought to have been born. The longing for home.”
Take heart: for every longing there is an answering reality. There is a Way who will lead us home.
According to His great mercy,
He has caused us to be born again to a living hope
through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,
to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading,
kept in heaven for you.
Elisabeth Adams 