Who Stole Forever?
the functional demise of organized religion. I’m encouraging you to think about something fundamentally profounder than that. I am getting you to think about the intersection between who you are by design and how you live every day. Perhaps I should state it more forcefully. The forever-ism that is hardwired inside you col- lides with the now-ism that is everywhere around you, resulting in a lot of carnage. What we all internally long for in some way collides with what we end up living for every day. What we were hardwired to be collides with how we live. What was designed to propel every- thing we do collides with what motivates us. What our minds were designed to grasp and hold on to collides with what our senses tell us is real. In our heart of hearts, in myriad situations of life, the future wars with the present. It is one of the abiding contradictions of modern human life yet was never meant to be this way. Now was designed to be an introduction to hereafter, and hereafter was designed to be the living hope of now. But the schizophrenia is all around us. Most of us will live in a state of happy delusion, failing to grasp the beauty we have missed as we live in a way we were never meant to live. Consider these words of C. S. Lewis. Most of us find it very difficult to want “Heaven” at all — except in so far as “Heaven” means meeting again our friends who have died. One reason for this difficulty is that we have not been trained: our whole education tends to fix our minds on this world. Another reason is that when the real want for Heaven is present in us, we do not recognize it. Most people, if they really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they never quite keep their promise. 4 Life, real life as it was designed to be, simply cannot work without eternity. It is the nature of design. You will never see your neighbor drive his speedboat out of his garage and down the
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