I’ve been on this Christian journey for most of my life, seeking to grow in relationship with the Lord. Now that I’m older—not old, mind you—the longing for eternity, which will far eclipse what we currently consider “life,” has become more real. C. S. Lewis’s The Weight of Glory sermon has, for many years, captured for me the sense of expectation that I sometimes feel as I look forward to the end of this temporal existence and the entrance into the next, and neverending, phase:
The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret.
And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory . . . becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory meant good report with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last. . . .
Apparently, then, 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 have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.
I feel that ache from time to time, waiting for my summons that will usher me inside that eternal door.