Something great happened yesterday. While 20 of us were piled into a van for a
5-hour drive (which actually took 12 hours) through Southern Africa, I
discovered a completely new meaning to the tattoo that I got over a year ago. I had always referenced the first part of
Ecclesiastes 3:11 when I explained it… “He has made everything beautiful in its
time”. But I usually didn’t include the
second, lengthy part of the verse… “He has also stitched eternity into the
human heart, yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” I didn’t realize the depth, beauty, and
intensity of its meaning… until my eyes were opened to it yesterday, while
smashed in the back corner of a van.
Do you ever get that aching feeling in your soul that
nothing on this world can really satisfy you?
You can live a completely comfortable life, having everything you need,
and many of the things that you want.
The house, the car, the clothes, the family, the job, the retirement
plan. It’s all yours. And yet, your soul
cries out in homesickness. You try out a
new relationship, a new fashion style, you buy the next iPhone and maybe even a
new house.
But people let you down.
You get hurt by their words and actions.
You turn on the TV and hear about another shooting, more destruction and
death than you can handle. And in the
midst of this pain, your soul cries out: “this just isn’t RIGHT! There’s got to be something MORE! This can’t
be how life was supposed to be… this isn’t HOME.” Why do you feel that? What’s going on there?
It’s because there IS more, and this ISN’T the way life was
supposed to be. Ever since the days of
Adam and Eve and the fall of the world, sin has prevailed and caused death and
destruction… but that’s not what it was intended to be. We do a million different things to get the
feeling of completeness that we so long for, to finally cure the homesickness
we feel. We are always upgrading to
something bigger and better, because we think that the next best thing will
finally make our lives whole… right? Maybe we even look back and romanticize our
past, on moments of beauty, when we thought that we felt whole, like we were
finally home, right where we belonged.
We try to recreate those moments of beauty, but they never really measure
up to what we thought they once were.
Those moments weren’t beauty in and of themselves; they were just
vessels for which beauty could shine through.
C.S. Lewis states in his sermon on heaven, “The Weight of
Glory,” that “our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something
in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some
door which we’ve always seen from the outside is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real
situation. If we find ourselves with the desire that nothing in this world can
satisfy, the most probably explanation is that we were made for another world.”
In John 14, Jesus tells his disciples that he is preparing a
room in his Father’s house for them. A
homecoming, if you will. This is a
picture of heaven, of eternity—and how does Jesus say we get there? “I am the way and the truth and the
life.” So, we get this longing in our
hearts for more because THIS ISN’T OUR HOME!
We were made for far more than this earth can provide. Jesus can take us there, to a place where we
finally are 100% satisfied, a place where we’ve never felt more at home in our
whole lives.
This brings me to the second part of my tattoo… in the verse
it says that “He has also stitched eternity into the human heart”. We literally KNOW in our hearts that there’s
something more, because God PUT a longing for eternity within us. How awesome is THAT! I’ve got to admit, I am
pumped up about having this etched into my flesh in permanent ink. Because when I start to get caught up in the
world, losing focus while trying to make my life feel complete, I can look down
on my arm and remember: this is not my
home. I can put my hope in Jesus,
who will one day lead me home when I leave this world and enter another. This means that death won’t be a sunset—it
won’t be the end; it will be a sunrise—the dawn, the very beginning, of life
how it was meant to be.
The longing in our hearts for completeness is proof that
there’s something more. A new iPhone
will make you think that your life is complete… for about a week. And then the inevitable will happen; you will
want more.
Break away from this vicious cycle and put your trust in
Jesus instead of in the world. Material
possessions and relationships won’t continue to satisfy. But if you hope in Him, you can be confident
in knowing that this isn’t your home, and one day he will take you to a place
of complete satisfaction once and for all.
