January 4, Joy is the serious business of heaven

I was just reading Ecclesiastes the other night. It's such a sombre book, depressing in a way. "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity." This doesn't matter, and that doesn't matter, and everything you concentrate on and work after and put your mind to is just a big fat waste of time. I get it but it sure can be a downer.

I like the way C.S. Lewis says it better but he really is saying the same thing. All of the 'work, and toil, and anxieties' down here surely don't reflect the business of heaven. "Joy is the serious business of heaven." God is in control. God is the Creator, the Protector, the Provider; we really haven't any good reason for all this stress. In heaven I imagine we'd be wrapped up in sheer delight at His presence and absolute joy in life without sin.

I set out to make this a month of simplicity and clarity. And I love how the writings of Lewis are encouraging the plan. Simple, quite, focused, and yes joyful rest, this is heavenly. We are most alive in God's presence when we've separated ourselves from "our" work and are simply and perfectly in Him.

While we are in this 'valley of tears,' cursed  with labour, hemmed round with necessities, tripped up with frustrations, doomed to perpetual plannings, puzzlings, and anxieties, certain qualities that must belong to the celestial condition have no chance to get through, can project no image of themselves, except in activities which, for us here and now, are frivolous. For surely we must suppose the life of the blessed to be an end in itself, indeed The End: to be utterly spontaneous; to be the complete reconciliation of boundless freedom with order- with the most delicately adjusted, supple, intricate, and beautiful order? How can you find any image of this in the 'serious' activities either of our natural or of our (present) spiritual life? Either in our precarious and heartbroken affections or in the Way which is always, in some degree, a via crucis? No.... It is only in our "hours off," only in our moments of permitted festivity, that we find an analogy. Dance and game are frivolous, unimportant down here; for 'down here' is not their natural place. Here they are moment's rest from the life we were placed here to live. But in this world everything is upside down. That which, if it could be prolonged here, would be truancy, it is likest that which in a better country is the End of ends. Joy is the serious business of Heaven.
-C.S. Lewis
The Business of Heaven