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(A five-minute read.)
Those who know me well enough know that one of my favorite things to do in life is to be sad. It feels good to feel sad. I wouldn’t necessarily consider myself to be a melancholy, but I definitely have melancholic tendencies.
This past Sunday evening, I spent about 90 minutes being sad as I drove home from southern Maine after spending the last ten days at an annual church event I have to participate in and help lead. My sadness was the culmination and combination of a number of factors.
For whatever reason, though I don’t necessarily enjoy this annual event—which we call “camp meeting,” where hundreds of Seventh-day Adventists from my region camp for a week or so, fellowship with one another, and attend religious meetings—it always stirs up something within me when it’s all over. For my kids, it’s one of their favorite events of the year and it thus marks a yearly reminder of how they’re growing up—way too fast—and how I have grown up. I started attending this camp meeting regularly when I was 16 or 17, after having attended a similar event my whole childhood in southern New England, and it thus brings back a flood of memories.
At the same time, I received some very sad news earlier in the day that was quite unexpected. A childhood friend, whom I went to high school with as well, passed away suddenly on Saturday. I had just recently reconnected with her after many years and interviewed her for my podcast, learning her story of addiction and recovery, discovering how she had survived and been learning to reframe her experience of abuse from childhood. She was such a beautiful person—inside and out—but now was no more, just 17 days before her 40th birthday.
This news came on the heels of learning a week before of the tragic passing of a young man, whom I didn’t know personally but knew of. He had been hiking Mt. Jefferson in Oregon with a group of people when the weather turned bad. He kept forging forward when they turned around, and went missing. I followed along on social media as people were sending out updates in the search for him—until everyone’s fears were realized when they discovered he had not made it, apparently the victim of an avalanche.
As I said, I didn’t know him personally, but I knew of him. He had gone to my alma mater, was a PhD candidate at Baylor University, and followed me on social media. He was just 29.
All these realities combined to make a melancholic concoction for me as I drove home—and certainly the sad and sentimental music I listened to provided significant aid, causing my eyes to well up in tears for nearly the whole drive.
It all just reminded me of the fleeting and temporal nature of life. It reminded me of all the goodbyes I’ve said in my life—of friendships gained and friendships lost, of time spent with people and time lost with people. It reminded me that nothing lasts forever, that we can’t hold on to any moment or expect that we can just freeze it in time. It reminded me that the only constant in life is change.
Indeed, in a particularly melancholy moment himself, the New Testament writer James asked the rhetorical question, “What is your life?” before answering, “It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away” (James 4:14).
Our lives, by their very nature, are temporal, mortal, fleeting, passing.
But the thing is, that’s not good enough for me. I have a hard time accepting that that’s the totality of our existence. There has to be more than our three score and ten. It seems to me that if the atheistic story is correct—that humans evolved by purely naturalistic means and we live our few years and then fade into eternal oblivion—then life is the cruelest joke in the universe. What’s the point of it all?
Of course, observers have long noted that this is the womb from which religion was birthed. Religion—belief in God, belief in eternity—is ultimately a human answer to eternal death. Though speaking of a different context, Marx famously said that religion is the “opium of the people.” It provides comfort and hope for those who aren’t content with the finitude of life. It thus doesn’t point to anything real.
I have no way to empirically or objectively disprove that. Such observations may be correct. But I can’t accept them—and, as I’ve written before, the hope I cling to is as good an option as any if this life is all we have anyway.
The Christian writer C. S. Lewis repeatedly tried his hand at addressing this objection. In one of those places, during an address that was turned into a book called The Weight of Glory, he framed it this way:
Do what they will, then, we remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy. . . . A man’s physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desires for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called “falling in love” occurred in a sexless world.
I don’t know that Lewis proved the reality of eternity with such an observation, but I find it compelling.
Simply put: the reason why goodbyes are so hard, the reason why loss is so tragic, is because they point to something innate within us that refuses to believe that temporality is the final word. And this innate refusal points to real reality; it’s a strong—and for me, at least, undeniable—argument for the actual existence of that for which our hearts long.
King Solomon, another person given to melancholy at times, pointed to this idea in his book Ecclesiastes. God “has made everything beautiful in its time,” he explained, touching on the fleeting nature of temporal beauty. “But also,” he further reflected, “he has planted eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).
In other words, according to wise Solomon, the reason why human beings experience existential angst, the reason why we experience sadness over loss and the temporal nature of life, is because God has planted in our hearts the longing for the eternal—a craving for the forever. And like a magnet that draws metal, God calls out to us from eternity, seeking to pull us into the orbit of his never-ending and ceaseless love.
Elsewhere, C. S. Lewis touched upon how the nature of sadness and pain reflects this reality. “We can ignore even pleasure,” he wrote in The Problem of Pain. “But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
As I said, I’m buying what C. S. Lewis and Solomon are selling. And I’m buying what my heart is telling me.
Perhaps my favorite portrayal of all this comes from the book, and especially the theatrical rendition of, The Shack. In the story, Mack, the main character who has a rough childhood and turns his back on God, loses his youngest daughter, six-year-old Missy. While on a family camping trip in Oregon (where, ironically, I’m flying to today), Missy is abducted and then brutally murdered in a remote shack by an unidentified person. Mack is ultimately invited to that shack by God and has a life-altering encounter with the trinity, as he wrestles with his loss and learns and unlearns ideas about who God is.
The whole story is riveting, but the part that gets me the most—which caused me to weep and weep and weep the first time I watched the movie (not least because I had a six-year-old daughter at the time)—is when Mack is allowed to see Missy. She is running in a sun-drenched field in the late afternoon sun with a bunch of other kids, laughing, rejoicing, twirling around. And there’s Jesus, in the midst of them, laughing, twirling, rejoicing with them. And then he stoops over and lifts Missy up into his arms, and they giggle and revel in the beauty of eternity.
It is such an intoxicating scene. It portrays what our hearts long for. It captures what I want, what I need.
We intuitively know that there has to be something beyond the here-and-now. And all the sad goodbyes we experience in this life point us to the unmistakable conclusion that the reason we hate goodbyes so much is because we know we were created to never have to say them.
Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil student at the University of Oxford (what they call a PhD), focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.
As someone who lost a parent a few months ago, I know what it is like to feel the recent pain of loss like what you described. As far as the Bible is concerned, death (and other types of loss) is an outlier, an enemy, not part of God's plan. It seems to me, we were created with eternity in mind, and so when we know we are mortal we instinctively seek for the eternal. As you indicated, we can't necessarily prove beyond all doubt that there is an eternal life, but it it seems to me an eternal life is ultimately the only thing that makes any real sense of the loss we feel in our mortal state.