“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back” (C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces).

It’s that longing. If you watch TV at all, you are led to believe that you can fill that longing with a new car or a new kitchen appliance. Or maybe if you drink the right beer or wear the right kind of sweaters. Just about anything and everything from fast food to cologne to mattresses will satisfy that deepest of longings inside of us, or so we’re told.

I think all of us have deep longings that nothing we do or buy or acquire can ever truly satisfy. For most of us, we’re unable to even name what that longing is or even pinpoint what it is that we truly desire.

That C. S. Lewis guy also said that if we have longings that nothing in this world can satisfy, then it means that we were created for another world. I think he was on to something.

I personally find myself longing more and more for a world I’ve never seen before, but one that I have dreamed about. I imagine it will look a whole lot like Mr. Lewis’ Narnia, especially the one described in toward the end of his book, The Last Battle.

“Death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that’s all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet” (C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces).