“More longing for home,” (“More Holiness Give Me”, Phillip Paul Bliss). In Surprised By Joy, CS Lewis explains that Joy is “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction”; that it has in common with Happiness and Pleasure only “That anyone who has experienced it will want it again”; and that in its quality “it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want.” We are creatures of joy and our Heavenly Father has filled the Earth with an almost infinite variety of wonderful things. Our fellow men and women today and through all of the ages have also created many marvelous works that can thrill and inspire and delight us. However, this world and all of the pleasures and excitements and fascinations and beauties that it contains are only pale shadows of our true home. Whatever happiness or satisfaction that we might find with the things of this world does not even begin to tip the scales of the far weightier and eternal form of glory that awaits us in our true home if only we will be faithful in all things which our Father commands us. The longing that we feel for our true home is a kind of grief, a sweet sorrow for the true joy of which we can only at present taste mere traces, like a half-remembered favorite meal from our childhood. But that longing can act as a talisman to ward off the temptations of cheap pleasures and instant gratification, all of which are ultimately only misery masquerading as happiness. We could look at the current state of the world with all of its myriad problems and conclude that we are about as far as we could ever get from our Celestial Home and getting farther all the time and there is nothing that we can do about it. Or, we can waste and wear out our lives in building up the Kingdom of God and filling our lives, our homes, and our communities with so much of the pure love of Christ that God will not be able to help it but to come down Himself to dwell among us.
