Norris Family News

Happily Ever After

The one thing that most consistently fuels my faith is the hope of Heaven. The simple gospel is that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him would not perish but have eternal life. It doesn’t say that we might have forgiveness, peace, happiness, or prosperity, though we may have all of those things. The promise is eternal life. Can that be? It is so hard to fathom in the midst of the pressing reality of our very real, tangible, and often painful lives here on earth. And yet, that is the promise. The gospels describe Jesus after He rose from the dead as having a new kind of existence; solid and yet able to pass through walls, and that He is the first of this new kind of man. Paul describes the glory of the resurrected body that is to be ours one day. C.S. Lewis, in his essay The Weight of Glory, eloquently expressed the fact that one day this world will be forgotten dust and we will be in the presence of our Father in His place (Heaven) and He will turn His face toward us with the only approval that will ever matter. The universe we live in now is so staggeringly awesome, daily revealing greater and deeper testimonies to the genius and love of our Creator. If this is the temporal, then imagine what the eternal universe will be like! Indeed, no eye has seen nor ear heard.

The critic, indeed the critic in my own self, says, “What a pretty fairy tale you believe in.” Certainly in light of the here and now of flesh and blood, of earth, wind and fire, of health and sickness, of joys and sorrows, of war, hunger, and injustice, Heaven seems like the greatest fairy tale ever devised. Well, in a sense that is really what it is! It is the pattern for all fairy tales. It is the archetype of all stories where the underdogs are rescued and live happily ever after. It is The Story of all stories to which our hearts constantly yearn! Every “good” story is good because it contains elements that resonate with this blessed hope God has built into each one of us. So while Heaven often seems so far away and so imaginary, every thought, desire, and purpose of my existence validates its reality. In The Weight of Glory, Lewis says that my hunger does not prove that I will have bread to satisfy it, but it does prove that I am a being whose existence requires food to live. The nature of my fleshly being requires food. More abstractly the nature of my soul being requires love and acceptance, and even more abstractly, the nature of my being yearns for redemption (of both soul and flesh) and that someday, I will live happily ever after. The only alternative is atheism/materialism/existentialism which, in its gloom, sees all good stories (even true ones) as fairy tales because it cannot and it must not acknowledge any higher purpose or target for our existence.

In another C. S. Lewis book called The Magician’s Nephew, Aslan (the book’s Creator/Christ figure) has created a new world called Narnia. In this world he made all the plants and animals that we know and love here on Earth. But in Narnia, he chose some of the creatures to become “talking beasts.” He gave them language and set them apart from the rest of the animals. Not long after this event, one of the creatures does something funny and everyone laughs. He has the honor of having made (or being) the first joke. Aslan joins in their laughter and encourages them saying, “Laugh and fear not, creatures. Now that you are no longer dumb and witless, you need not always be grave. For jokes as well as justice come in with speech.” The mountain lion here above us in the Colorado mountains, beautiful as he is, he is always grave. He only exists. There is no such thing as a good story to him. He does not laugh or cry or hope. Justice does not exist for him. He does not laugh because to him there are no ironies. There are no ironies because there is no way things ought to be. Things just are. This is the reality that the atheist worldview says is true for humans as well. The gray, hopeless, purposeless existence of George Orwell’s 1984 is the nature of the atheist reality. And yet, we have been given language. With language we can create, we can love, we can laugh! With language we can express the yearnings and the oughts, in our hearts. Even the book 1984 expresses the constant human yearning for purpose and life beyond the “grave” with the protagonist’s forbidden desire to write his own thoughts on a clean, white page. With language we tell stories. With language we see beyond the simple existence of day to day life and yearn for that story in which we will ultimately see justice, have genuine approval, and live happily ever after.

--Thaine