Heaven on Earth

I love the fall season, and I find myself loving it more as I grow older. I’ll admit that sentimentality drives a lot of it. I grew up in South Alabama where college football is king, and hunting is a close second. Though the weather doesn’t allow the experience of a true fall where I’m from—an observation I only discovered after moving to Kentucky and witnessing the glory of God in the changing colors of trees—the approaching time of year fills me with warm memories of boiled peanuts, raw oysters, college football, and dove hunting. It transplants me back to Saturday afternoons shucking oysters with my dad and Sunday afternoons, shotguns in hand, encircling a peanut field with my friends.

I get similarly nostalgic during spring, autumn’s close cousin, when the green grass emerges from its long winter slumber, and baseball season begins. The sounds, sights, and smells of both seasons remind me that my heart is longing for something just beyond reach. I can taste it in short spurts of bliss, but it never lasts. The hot, dry summer or the cold, gray winter comes quickly. This past Saturday, for example, my fall nostalgia took a major hit when my beloved Auburn Tigers proved once again that they’ve still got a long way to go. Maybe next year.

Do you ever experience those glimpses? It doesn’t have to be the changing seasons that do it for you. I get similar feelings sometimes at concerts. Sometimes it comes over me during mundane family dinners with my wife and children when an unforeseen cheeriness pervades the room. Most often, I experience it at church—as the diverse voices of Christ’s redeemed people sing in unison about the glory of Christ or when a testimony leads me to taste grace more deeply. I can’t manufacture these experiences. They always come unexpectedly. It always feels simultaneously like a brand-new surprise and something I’ve experienced before. When it comes, I always want to stay there, but I never can. Life happens. The next thing must get done. Responsibilities beckon.

C.S. Lewis called these experiences “Joy.” For him, they were teeming with significance. He believed they revealed a universal longing within every human soul for what the Bible describes as “heaven.” Consider his oft-quoted insight from Mere Christianity: “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.”

While we often mistakenly disconnect our human desires from heaven, Lewis saw a profound connection. Our longings for joy, intimacy, significance, home, and pleasure are signposts to heaven. There’s a reason we can’t “stay there” in those brief moments of bliss in this life. The kid going to Disney World for the first time doesn’t stop at the sign at the park’s entrance. No, the sign may spark temporary excitement, but he knows it’s merely pointing ahead to the real thing. Similarly, our earthly experiences of Joy are signs of something better. We were made for God in heaven.

Or think of the image of a window. A window allows light and air to come into our homes. During fall and spring, you will probably open your window to “taste” the pleasant air outside. Opening your window is not the same thing as going outside. But it does allow you a glimpse of it. When the nostalgic bliss strikes unexpectedly, understand it’s not the real thing. Enjoy it as a gift just as you enjoy the cool autumn air through your open window. But understand, the whole experience will hit you only when you step outside. Or, in this case, when you enter heaven if indeed heaven is your destination.

We need this perspective desperately. First, we need it because it frees us to enjoy earthly pleasures more. Sometimes Christians carry unnecessary guilt from too much earthly enjoyment. We shouldn’t. Second, we need it to train our souls to long for heaven. Lewis believed that the prevailing perspective on these matters was deadly to the soul. In The Problem of Pain, he wrote, “You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years. Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy persistent, inner voice; almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.”

As the leaves change colors and the air begins to cool, as you sip your pumpkin spice latte and gather around a warm fire with friends and family, enjoy every second of it. But when the moment ends, don’t despair. Instead, direct your mind to the one in whose “presence there is fullness of joy” (Psalm 16:11). Be reminded: you were made for him. You were made for heaven.

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