Feeling Dissatisfied? Lean into It
God’s Gifts Don’t Last for Now
Have you noticed, since the rise of the smartphone camera, the difference between soaking up a wonderful moment and trying to capture it with the perfect shot? Maybe it’s a mountaintop view, a family gathering, or a sporting event. It’s so easy now to look at whatever we’re seeing through the few square inches of glass and liquid crystal that we’re holding in front of our faces. We want so badly to capture the moment—to make it ours and to make it last. But what do we actually end up with? An image so terribly shrunk down that it’s barely worth looking at, and most of us don’t. Meanwhile, even in the moment, our joy in the experience is shrunk down too, clouded by the quest for the perfect shot and hemmed in by the size of the screen we’re using to frame it. We enjoy the moment more when we just accept that it won’t last, that we can’t possibly fully capture it, and that we may as well soak it up while we can. There’s a powerful metaphor here for life overall.
You can find ancient wisdom from all over the world telling you to prioritize the present over the past or the future. And these days mindfulness is a multibillion-dollar industry. Who doesn’t want to work on living in the moment?
But how do you actually do it? How do you truly savor what’s right in front of you and keep it from being overwhelmed by grief over what you no longer have or longing for what you don’t have yet? You need to know that the best thing about every good thing on earth is the God whose goodness shines through it. There is no good apart from him. And there is no end to the goodness he intends to share of himself with his people.
Remember Heaven
Matthew McCullough
In these practical meditations on biblical promises, Matthew McCullough shows how cultivating heavenly mindedness shapes readers’ lives in the meantime.
The impulse to capture and hoard what we love flattens the world like a smartphone camera flattens an ocean backdrop. That impulse is rooted in false assumptions about reality. It assumes that this world is ultimate and its goodness a nonrenewable resource in short supply. It reflects a scarcity mindset. You stock up water in the Arizona desert. You don’t do that in the Mississippi Delta.
With the perspective of heaven, we can see things more clearly. There is no scarcity of goodness in God. When good gifts on earth are seen as they are in themselves, apart from God, they will be defined by all they are not. They don’t fully satisfy. They don’t last forever. They can’t be all we want them to be. But what if we see God’s goodness in them? Then we know whatever good things we taste now, however fleeting, come from an overflowing, neverending stream that keeps on giving.
God himself is the gift within all gifts. He means to satisfy us completely in his presence, in his time. Knowing this truth makes all the difference in our experience of partial and temporary pleasures here and now. We don’t have to always be looking over our shoulders, asking ourselves, “Is that all?” Now we can be always looking ahead and thinking, “I can’t wait to see what’s next.” Look for God’s goodness in whatever he gives you. Taste the pleasures of his right hand now, wherever you can, while you wait for the fullness of joy that lasts forever in his presence. All this leads to one more truth for life in the meantime.
Dissatisfaction Is a Friend for Now
Living now in the hope of heaven with the promise of fullness of joy in God’s own presence means leaning into dissatisfaction while we wait. Sometimes when my wife and I go out to dinner and a movie, we are suckered in by the popcorn. If we start with the movie, we pull into the theater looking forward to dinner. Maybe we even have a spot picked out in advance. Then we open the door to the theater, and the smell quite simply overwhelms us. The taste of the popcorn never lives up to the promise of that smell, but we’re suckers for it over and over, especially when we’re hungry already. More times than I can tell, we’ve ruined our appetites by gorging on bottomless popcorn that couldn’t possibly compare to the meal we were looking forward to. When we treat our hunger like an enemy to be neutralized as soon as possible, we miss out on what would have been so much better. When we leave our hunger where it is, even cultivate it over the course of a movie, we’re more ready than ever for the joy of that meal when it comes.
What makes the modern world go round is our temptation to throw everything we can muster at dissatisfaction, chasing the wind as if there’s something out there somewhere that can take the edge off our hunger. There isn’t. And God means for this to help us. Our hunger for something more is a precious ally, drawing us on toward the feast that is sure to come.
Living now in the hope of heaven with the promise of fullness of joy in God’s own presence means leaning into dissatisfaction while we wait.
In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis writes beautifully of how God uses dissatisfaction to protect us from nesting here and to preserve us for the true home he has prepared:
The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment He has scattered broadcast. . . . The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.1
The temporary joys scattered throughout our lives are precious gifts to refresh us on our journey. But God loves us too much to let us mistake them for home. For now, settled rest means mortal danger. He wants us restless, sober, watching, and waiting.
This side of heaven, with the perspective of heaven, our dissatisfaction is a gift we would be foolish to squander. In a way it is, as philosopher Peter Kreeft puts it, “the greatest thing on earth because it leads us to heaven, which is the greatest thing of all.”2
Notes:
- C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: Collier, 1962), 115.
- Peter Kreeft, Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 37.
This article is adapted from Remember Heaven: Meditations on the World to Come for Life in the Meantime by Matthew McCullough.
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