Good news: life’s current pleasures are not intended to be ultimately satisfying. Better still: Earth’s best gifts point heavenward. C.S. Lewis explains the relieved and expectant joy that results:
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. 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 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 other country and help others do the same. - C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, emphasis mine
Here's a truth to provoke lingering grins: Our joy need neither be naïve or put on in order to be genuine. Earthly joys are, of course, pleasurable, but there are better things coming. Have a happy Thanksgiving—without illusions!
3 comments:
Happy Thanksgiving!!! I’m Peppy and lives in North Idaho and for my Thirteen Thursday I go around blog hopping and find new blogs and list them. At times I’ve even ran into blogs that I read on a regular base.
It gives others a chance to visit other blogs.
Your most welcome to come and visit my blog and have cup a coffee and be free to look around.
Oh how i love that excerpt from Mere Christianity...i remember the first time i read it and i how much it affected me...
It's one of my favorite things Lewis has ever written. (: Talk about a reason to keep going...!
Your baby is unbelievably cute, by the way.
C.S. Lewis certainly had a way with words that put truth in focus. If only we could all think about life in the way of Lewis.
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