It is a common human experience to long for the world and our lives to be better than what they are. We have a longing for more justice, goodness and beauty than we experience. This engenders apologetic questions like….. Where does this longing come from? If the life we know is all there is, then why are we longing for something different as if it were better? Is this longing evidence for the existence of a God of justice, goodness and beauty?

This longing leads many to faith in Jesus Christ and the belief in a good God who created a world that is not the way it is supposed to be. In Christ there is the promise of the fulfillment of that longing in a future life with God. This life is not all that there is and people want to align themselves with a God who is working to bring about a much better world.

But many end up abandoning their faith when they do not experience their Christian faith making the world better. This could be painful circumstances in their lives, or suffering in general, that they would expect a good God to prevent or alleviate….. when life seems to happen as if this good God they are believing in does not exist. Or it could also be when they become disillusioned by what they see other Christians doing and saying that is not just, good or beautiful. How can this faith be real if the people who claim to have it are no better than everybody else? Those who walk away from the faith still have the longing for a better world, but they have decided that Christianity turned out to not be a path to that better world.

I can understand the disillusionment when you do not experience what you expect to experience with your Christian faith. If your faith is founded on what you experience, if that is what makes your faith real and not just imaginary, then walking away from that faith is an honest response to the reality of your experience. But what do you do with the longing if you walk away from the faith? That is the question I want to ask.

What if our faith is founded not on what we experience but on the longing? That is a firm foundation because it does not change based on what we experience in our lives or see in others. What if Christians are fundamentally people who live with a longing for justice, goodness and beauty rather than people who experience these things in their relationship with God? They trust in Christ’s promise that they will one day experience them. A faith based on this longing is not susceptible to voices that tell us that our faith is just wishful thinking because those voices do not effect the longing.

The best example of a faith based on longing is from C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair when the Green Witch is convincing them that Narnia is not real but only a product of their wishful thinking. Here is a summary of the chapter and Puddleglum’s full speech. Puddleglum will not give up his longing for Narnia even when he is being persuaded that Narnia may not be real.

That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.

It strikes me that a faith founded on longing is unshakeable by what we do or do not experience in our lives. I wonder what kind of witness we would have if we were known as the people who follow their longing for a better world even when it seems an impossible dream. It would be a witness that we are “born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for us.”(1 Peter 1:3). What would it look like to live and work from that foundation?

I would love to connect with you about these posts if they have stirred any thoughts or questions. Take a minute, shoot me an email at bo@leavenedlives.org, and let’s see where that takes us.