Heaven

There you are, standing at the window watching oak leaves fall from dark boughs, and without your warning your whole body fills with longing for something you can’t name,

something you’ve lost, but never had,

something that your nostalgic for, but yet don’t remember.

You sense a joy so huge that it breaks you, a sorrow so deep it cleanses.

Or in line at a store one day, you turn and look at a child who doesn’t notice you.

The skin on her face curves down flushed and smooth along her cheekbones and creases into delicate folds at her eyes.

There is a wild hope in her eyes, and her beauty pierces you in a way you don’t understand.

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 swin: 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 mean the universe is a fraud…earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.

How can this be? You might ask.

The answer; You want to go home

The instinct for heaven is just that- homesickness, ancient as night, urgent as daybreak.

All your longings- for the place you grew up, for the taste of the desserts your mom used to make, for the bend in the river where your dad used to take you fishing, or the smell of the baseball field where you grew up- all these longings are homesickness, a wanting in full what all these things ONLY hint at, only prick you with. These are the things seen that conjure in our emotions the the Things Unseen.

–C.S. Lewis & Mark Buchanan

We thirst for something we do not know
Are homesick for somewhere we have never been
Feel a longing, an ache we cannot name
Nothing on Earth can fulfill it
and we feel we are the only ones who carry
this great sadness for somewhere, someplace else

Heaven is the home that we’ve never been
Jesus is the father we’ve never met
yet we yearn, ache for him
and most of us don’t even know who and where we are so homesick for