For The Love Of Crumbs

For the Love of Crumbs

We’re creatures of desire, made to long for that out-of-reach something, made to ache for what we sense but cannot see. C. S. Lewis called that inconsolable longing by its German name, sehnsucht, and a keen sense of it infused his writing and his life. “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy,” he wrote, “the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”^a

What Lewis discovered is that in ignorance of the true object of our hardwired longing—God—we substitute other things. We settle for less because we cannot imagine more or trouble ourselves to wait or to press on for the promise of that “other world.” Especially when we are so hopelessly mired in this one.

We take crumbs when God would offer a feast. We substitute food or sex or worldly beauty or shallow friendships when we know they will not ultimately satisfy. Maybe we reckon that such meager pleasures are all that we can have—all that we deserve. In the latter we may be right, but in the former, we could not be more wrong.

God made us for himself—with the capacity to enjoy him forever. The Fall made us beggars for crumbs that will not—cannot—fully satisfy. But the table is set for us. It is groaning with good things. Any delight or pleasure that this world can offer is but a foretaste of the great, great feast that lies before us.

Still . . . we are not there yet. This wide place we are traveling through is mean and harsh and most unwelcoming at times—but that is no reason to imagine it is not crammed with hints of the glory that will one day be ours. And while we hope for what we cannot see, there is more than enough room and reason to delight in what our eyes can already comprehend: the daily, fleeting glimpses (crumbs?) of his goodness that are everywhere, always. We are made for just that kind of joy.

You will make known to me the path of life; in Your presence is fullness of joy; in Your right hand there are pleasures forever.

Psalm 16:11, NASB

^a C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 1980), 137–38.