Until the Glimmers Are Gone

He flopped around in the blasting wind tunnel, like a spaghetti noodle in a pot of boiling water. The instructor struggled to stretch out the small boy’s contorting limbs to achieve a neutral posture, but soon his time was up and the boy stepped out of the tunnel. One by one I watched the others in my group take their turn leaning into the twelve-foot wide tunnel of the indoor skydiving center. After about sixty seconds of a suspended belly flop onto winds up to 170 mph, complete with cheeks flapping in the breeze like flags on a pole, each person stepped out with huge grins smeared across their faces.

I was a little nervous myself. I only knew a few people in my group, and who wants to flop around like a hiccupping walrus in front of a bunch of strangers? But as I took my turn and stretched out my legs and arms, all I could do was grin. There was literally nothing but gushing air to hold me up. Then the wind speed increased and I was skyrocketed into the tunnel and then let down, high, then low, high, and then low, like a leaf tossed around in a storm. I was falling without actually falling. The feeling was sensational in every sense of the word and after stepping out of the tunnel and high-fiving my friends, I found myself thinking, I kind of want to do real skydiving now.

It happens often in life that we get a taste for something, but instead of satisfying us, it only increases our thirst. We crave real peace and joy and we catch glimmers of it all the time, but only glimmers. It blazes into our lives at certain beautiful moments, but it quickly fades away, like the last flashes of fireworks on the Fourth of July. And we feel the hole. We feel it when we close the cover of our book and wish the story wasn’t over. We feel it anytime we say goodbye to a friend or loved one. We grasp and claw at the bits and pieces, but can never sink our teeth into the real thing.

The Lord doesn’t give us these desires to taunt or tease us. C.S. Lewis said in his book The Problem of Pain, “Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.” If God gave us these longings, it is because He will someday fulfill them. So, when you feel inside you the dichotomy of joy and sorrow, pleasure and aching, fullness and vacancy, and longing echoes through your hollow soul, pray to the Father that He will keep your heart strong until He comes to fill it with everlasting life and the glimmers are replaced with the real thing.