Longing and Hope

                What is our purpose lives?  Through much contemplation I have come to a general realization that the purpose of human life must be to glorify the God that made them.  God has created us to glorify him and in so doing he has created us with longings that can only be filled by him. However, we try to fill these longings with finite short-term indulgences and good yet inadequate desires.  C.S. Lewis said “It would seem that out lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.  We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink, and sex, and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child that want to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea. We are far too easily pleased.” The first point C. S. Lewis brings up is that our desires are not bad but misguided. We look for fulfillment in worldly pleasures rather than the heavenly rewards that God has for us. He uses the analogy of a child playing in a slum to describe how ignorant we are to God’s plans for our lives.  Our longings are a necessity for us to have real hope. We often lose sight of these longings because we often become jaded and rather pursue immediate gratification. However, the example that Plantinga makes of Martin Luther King Jr. shows how longing can place hope in others. King had a longing for racial equality for his children and for all people, and his longing demonstrated a need in his society and brought hope of racial equality to others. Similarly we need to have longing in order to have hope, but having longing is not the only thing that gives or brings us hope. We must also have imagination, because if we do not have an imagination we cannot long for anything, and without that longing we have no hope for anything.  Also faith is an important part of having hope for something because if we have to trust that God will provide and take care of us no matter what outcome is.

                Plantinga Brings up another important point in talking about what we should be longing for.  Although he says it is natural and good to hope in our own well-beings, however, we must hope for something bigger.  We must hope for the God to reconcile his creation back to himself.  We must hope for a better world in which there is no evil, the world that God intended for us to live in.   We must hope to do God’s will for our lives and be agents of his renewal.  This leads back to our purpose in life, to live holy lives as God’s servants working to glorify him in all that we do.