Have you ever gone running and come back breathless, exhausted and longing to quench your thirst with a big cold bottle of Gatorade? Do your remember when you lift the bottle up and start to pour the cold liquid down your throat; for a moment it is the most wonderful feeling, like inhaling pure, refreshing, air after being stuck in a stuffy room for far too long. But to your dismay, the pleasure and refreshment doesn’t last. You need to breathe, your tongue gets numb, the taste starts to fail, your stomach says enough. That wonderful feeling of pleasure which at first seemed to rush over you like a tidal wave suddenly falls away like sand between the fingers of a clenched fist. I hate that feeling. Our current capacity for pleasure is so small. It’s frustrating. Everytime things like this happen (and it doesn’t only happen with food or drink e.g. music, imagery, emotions) I start thinking about what C.S. Lewis once wrote. I’d like to believe it is the greatest chapter of literature outside of the Bible I have ever read. It is the last chapter of his insightful book The Problem of Pain. In it he says the following:
Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. 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.’
I’d like to believe that the pleasure I experience when I drink cold Gatorade is an echo. But when at last I kneel to drink from the river of life, the heavenly taste of divine water, cool upon my tongue, quenching my thirst, will neither fade nor subside in its refreshment but swell into that wonderful pleasure of what Lewis calls the “sound itself” and what the awestruck psalmist calls “the fullness of joy.” And then I will say with Lewis, perhaps in my own words, “Here at last, is the stuff I was made for.”
Maranatha, the best is yet to come.
nice. thanks