"Here at last is the thing I was made for"--this phrase from Lewis' chapter on Heaven struck a chord within my heart when I read it. In fact, it practically burned gold on the page before me. "Here at last is the thing I was made for"--this is Lewis' description for the desire we have for heaven, a desire that we've had all along and has in fact encompassed all desires. Lewis wonders if "we have ever desired anything else." Heaven--eternity with Christ, to have finally bridged the gap between sin and God. To be with God forever in His Kingdom. How marvelous is that thought! How could I have possibly desired anything but that wondrous experience, that amazing reward?! When I look at that phrase, I'm reminded of the feeling I have when I know I'm filled by the Spirit, when the presence of Christ's Love washes over me: "Here at last is the thing I was made for". I feel complete, like I've been running a race and I've finally come to the finish. Yet this sensation sadly fades, not due to any fault of God's, but because of my own sinful self, my human weakness that takes me away from closeness with God.
I fail at that "self-surrender" Lewis spoke of; giving up my Self to God in order to "remain" in Him. I wonder if Heaven is the place where my failure of "self-surrender" will finally end and that sensation of completeness in Christ will last forever. We sing many songs of the everlasting glory of God, is Heaven one great hymn of this praise? When I was reading the Heaven chapter, I went back to look at the end of the Last Battle and highlighted the final paragraph of the Narnian tales:
"And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all stories, and we can truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."
Heaven is not the end, but the "beginning" of what we were truly meant to be--united eternally with Christ. This life and its sufferings are merely the "cover and title page", when at last we take that final breath and God calls us home, we come to "Chapter One of the Great Story". "Here at last is the thing I was made for"--my desire for Christ and Heaven are complete in one glorious moment that shall last forever in the "Narnia within Narnia"...something "so great and beautiful that I cannot write them."
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