Spring Forward

"Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home."

                                  - C.S.Lewis

This is our house in early spring. (sigh) Just look at it. The very thought of it is like heaven: pined for, distant and vaguely doubtful. (It's been a long winter.) I know the seasons will keep rotating on God's axis, as they always do, but outside my window right now cold rain is beating down the slowly melting snow, the sky is gray, the driveway is mud, and there's a cold draft coming in under the door. The clocks may have moved forward to spring last weekend, but Iowa sure hasn't.

Can you bear with me while I stretch an analogy? (I can't help myself, I'm afraid; one thing always reminds me of another. It's a sickness.)

I get irritated with myself for not being satisfied all the time. In the big picture of things, I've got it

almost embarrassingly good; my crosses are really pretty pathetic. But, here you have it: when it's winter, I want spring; when it's spring, I remember about weeds and mosquitoes and how my driveway needs grading after every rainstorm, and I long for winter again. When I was a young mother, I couldn't wait for all my toddlers to grow up and no longer need diaper changes, and then I couldn't wait for all my adolescents to grow up and no longer need me to educate them, and most recently, I've been waiting for my teenagers to grow up and no longer... be teenagers. (Bless their cantankerous hides.)

But, wait. (What was I thinking?) Now I want to put the brakes on it all. Stop the clocks, echoing in the empty rooms of my house! Can I go back to the toddler days now? How simple our troubles were then! But even now, I miss them, the grown up, independent, perfectly lovely people I worked so hard to get to the point that they'd move away and I'd miss them. How did I take for granted that part of the evolution of my job? That all the children would be happily settled elsewhere, but the empty rooms here would only echo with the memory of busy, useful, happy days? It was not all whining and spilt cereal.

 I know that it's the proper order of things, this stage of my life; I'm exceedingly proud of all our children and I love our beautiful home... But, see? There you go. Just not satisfied. Ever.

But here's the thing: I think we're not supposed to be satisfied. The idea we have of  home, true home, is wrapped in a hazy glow of perfect, unending, uninterrupted contentment. We want spring without weeds and mosquitoes and mud, and we want it to last forever and be so perfect that we never grow bored with it. You see where I'm going with this. We'll never find it here.

The ideal of perfection is perfectly real and placed in our hearts by God. We're meant to yearn for it, but since that perfection can only be found in heaven, our attempts to find it or make it in this world are doomed to failure.

The only facsimile of contentment we're ever going to find, really, is when we accept that perfect contentment is reserved for heaven. And we are making every effort to strive hard enough and love well enough to make it there.  The challenge is brushing off the earthly disappointments -- in things, in people, in bad weather, in ourselves -- recognizing them as temporary, and doing all the things with God's goal in mind.

Easy peasy, right? (Not!)

Don't ask me how to be mindful of this all the time. I haven't got a clue. It's a mindset I think the saints learned to cultivate, and I'm not even close to there yet. (If you know how to do it, message me, for heaven's sake!) But I do know, intellectually at least, that I'll be happiest if I remember that the ultimate goal isn't a mudless lawn or perfect health or everyone agreeing with me...  It's the permanent home, the forever spring, and it's not here on this earth. God made our hearts to only be satisfied with Him in heaven, our only true home.