These glimpses of joy and beauty can take our breath away. Sometimes the chief longing we have in our own hearts is to have those things. Luke, an author who wrote about Jesus' life, describes a moment when maybe Jesus felt such a longing. He describes people bringing their children to Jesus to bless and the disciples sending them away. Jesus stops his followers by calling the children to himself. (Luke 18:15-17) Maybe Jesus wanted children, marriage, and the other things we long for: stability, comfort, peace. But for Jesus, that longing did not define or consume him. He had another, deeper longing of which our best moment in our most loving relationship is but a tiny taste.
Jesus longed for that perfect relationship with God--pure and holy--that he had before his incarnation. Even though he was without sin, his experience of God was limited by his humanity (Philippians 2:6-8) . He longed for the day when his relationship to God was restored and for the experience of a perfect and sinless relationship among people. He knew that for which he longed because he had experienced the fully satisfying and glorious relationship with the Father in eternity past. Somehow, it seems that we forget Jesus' example because we long for things we see here and now only to be disappointed. Marriage isn't always blissful, parenting is hard, jobs cause stress instead of fulfillment, the list goes on.
What if we, too, could long for what Jesus did? What if we could see what glory awaited us in eternity? We only see it in glimpses, just on the periphery of our vision. We can sense it as the most wonderful smell in a whiff of air, only there for a second. We can only hear it as a distant melody that we used to know, but now can only catch a few of the notes. What are those sights, smells and sounds in our life as we wait for heaven? Aren't they seeing a beautiful marriage develop where the husband seeks to love his wife as Christ loved the church and the wife seeks to encourage godliness in her husband, a child who enthusiastically and unconditionally loves you, a friend who shares your sorrow? We have those moments of true intimacy, of deep friendship now, yet it is nothing to be compared to how we will be in heaven, when all of our relationships are healed.
This might sound like a "how-nice-for-you, keep-your-chin-up, don't-be-sad" essay, but the truth is that Jesus endured the cross so that we could have a pure and holy relationship with God and with each other. Eternity starts when we meet Jesus, and we can take genuine and lasting joy in the moments of our lives when we are happy because they are only tastes of what is to come in glory. I challenge you (and me!) to take joy in the moments--take joy in a godly marriage, even if it's seeing someone else's marriage, take joy in playing with toddlers even if you are not their parent, take joy in another's advancement while you remain plodding along. We can have joy because we have Jesus.