But in this world everything is upside down. That which, if it could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is likest that which in a better country is the End of ends. Joy is the serious business of Heaven.
~ C.S. Lewis
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.
~ Ephesians 1:2-6
Oh beloved, it’s true. We are His. He is ours. Fully, completely and forever we will have the ever-unfolding chance to get to know Him more fully. My humanity screams that i will never find the center of His heart. But something more deep within knows that i will indeed know Him fully one Day. Oh, what a Blessed Hope!
And it is moments like this for a believer, when we catch the scent of Who the wonderful One we both Love and serve is. We sense that He is absolutely abounding with Joy! And this is a Joy that has nothing to do with time or circumstance. It is, rather, a Joy that is the substance of the very strength of G_d Himself.
And in His Presence (Right now, with Him in us, and us in Him) is an abounding fullness of this same gorgeous strength.
Dear friends, this Joy has nothing to do with emotion. It has everything to do with us letting go of the very mindsets that drive our own emotions through the ever-changing circumstance of this life in the natural. This Joy is something that not does not have to fade. It simply does not fade, because it is made of immutable stuff. It is a thread that runs among the unchanging attributes of G_d, and the inexhaustible fuel of our intimate relationship with Him.
Can we see it? We are fully accepted by a Loving G_d who does not change His mind, ever. Can we, perhaps, just for one second let go of our day and dwell on this? Maybe just for a minute? Maybe all the time?
And can we see also, that this Joy can only grow as we dwell closer to Him? Can we see that we will, in fact, grow ever closer to Him throughout forever? Oh my.
This is Very Good News.
“Joy is the serious business of Heaven”
“I do not think that the life of Heaven bears any analogy to play or dance in respect of frivolity. I do think that while we are in this ‘valley of tears,’ cursed with labour, hemmed round with necessities, tripped up with frustrations, doomed to perpetual plannings, puzzlings, and anxieties, certain qualities that must belong to the celestial condition have no chance to get through, can project no image of themselves, except in activities which, for us here and now, are frivolous.
For surely we must suppose the life of the blessed to be an end in itself, indeed The End: to be utterly spontaneous; to be the complete reconciliation of boundless freedom with order–with the most delicately adjusted, supple, intricate, and beautiful order?
How can you find any image of this in the ‘serious’ activities either of our natural or of our (present) spiritual life? Either in our precarious and heart-broken affections or in the Way which is always, in some degree, a via crucis?
No, Malcolm. It is only in our ‘hours-off,’ only in our moments of permitted festivity, that we find an analogy. Dance and game are frivolous, unimportant down here; for ‘down here’ is not their natural place. Here, they are a moment’s rest from the life we were place here to live.
But in this world everything is upside down. That which , if it could be prolonged here, would be a truancy, is likest that which in a better country is the End of ends. Joy is the serious business of Heaven.”
~C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
