Further Up and Further In

In my mind, there is a list of people I want to get to know when I get to heaven (during the time I'm not on my face worshipping my King, if such a time exists).  I want to get to know my grandfathers better.  I want to meet the older brother or sister that never got to see this world because of a miscarriage.  I want to meet Paul.  I want to meet Peter.  There are more, but you get the picture.  Another one of those people is C.S. Lewis.  I love his books.  Everything I've read by him has been fantastic, and it has taught me so much.  The Narnia books in particular are excellent-they are my favorite books of all time, and I can't wait to get to read them to my kids one day.  Lewis had such a gift of putting words to paper and painting pictures with those words.  Every time I read one of these books, I learn something new, and God shows Himself to me in a new and beautiful way.

In The Last Battle, the last of the seven Narnia books, he describes the end of the journey for the beloved characters that he created.  He brings them into the true Narnia, and tells them to run, and to run further up and further in, always deeper into the land.  The cool thing is, the deeper they get, the bigger it gets, and the more real it gets-it's crazy.  And they stop running to talk, and Aslan speaks to them.  He tells them, "You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be."  He then tells them that they have entered heaven, and Lewis finishes up the book with this paragraph.  "And for us, this is the end of all the stories, and we can most 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 forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."

That is beautiful.  I recommend reading the whole book, if only for the full description of Lewis's vision of the Narnian heaven.  But as I read this and write about it, I await God's heaven with so much anticipation.  Because Lewis understood it perfectly: not what heaven looked like, or how it's laid out, or what will happen when we get there.  What he understood was the significance of it: we are going to spend the rest of forever living in perfect harmony with a beautiful and loving God, and that is the true story of humanity.  The ransom and redemption of enemies, and a drawing to Himself of us whom He loves.  And one day, that will be my story that will begin and never end.