I wake up most mornings, ideally before everyone else, to hit the couch in our office and try to come up with something to blog about. Our youngest gets up 15 minutes after I do, snuggles up close, grabs my phone and shops on Amazon while I write.

She holds her face five inches from the screen, eyes wide open like young Harry Potter in The Sorcerer’s Stone when he first glared into his family’s vault. In her mind this is real – a pair of Elsa boots will change everything.

Part of me wants to shut it down. Kids should engage with more meaningful things; stuff that might bring a bit more life into their life, but the look on her face is precious to me. She’s not looking at cheap plastic junk, she’s dreaming, big. There’s nothing sweeter than a child who’s gotten hope all over her face. The older I get, the less likely I am to try and clean it off.

But we want to protect our kids from the constant, nagging disappointment of this place, to prepare them for an adult world that doesn’t suffer a child’s hope, one that too frequently mops the floor with fools who can’t keep their dreams tethered to “reality.”

So, being the good Christian parent, I give her a lecture about saving money and finding comfort in Jesus, then turn around and put a few hundred dollars worth of Jeep accessories in my cart.

We all want stuff.

Sadly, shopping doesn’t satisfy our desires, it wakes them up. The more we have, the more havoc we unleash. The same goes for all the other “stuff” we’re hoping to acquire: comfort, pleasure, fame, significance, influence – the more we manage to unearth, the deeper we’ll dig, ’til our nails bleed.

At some point we’re forced to accept the depressing reality that our desires are too big for this place – no amount of getting will suppress the wanting. We are desire, pure and simple.

Wisdom says, “That’s just how it is – we have to find a way to be thankful for the things we have and move on.” Unfortunately, that always devolves into what the psychotherapeutical world calls repression: “the process and effect of keeping particular thoughts and wishes out of the conscious mind in order to defend or protect it.” In our pursuit of thankfulness we ignore one of the most fundamental parts of being human, and we pay for it. The quickest way to a half-lived life, one potentially fraught with mental illness, is to “grow up,” believing that our desires aren’t real, or that they’re stupid, unspiritual, irresponsible.

Dangerous.

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.” ~ Sigmund Freud

So, especially in church circles, we tiptoe quietly around our beshackled fancy and talk instead about mission, bible, finances, politics, good relationships, what God wants from us, “right” theology, the moral life, self control…

… how to become more like Jesus.

But you can’t become more like Jesus without becoming more like yourself, and you can’t do that apart from honest, regular encounters with desire – not the desire for more stuff, or a better job, a greener lawn, etc., but the underlying desire that drives it all.

The Elsa boots in our hearts have nothing to do with footwear, and everything to do with what they represent. Wanting a bigger house is almost completely unrelated to more space, a better neighborhood, etc. Nobody changes their locale and forever stops wanting to change their locale. Our hopes are leashed to a much deeper want for comfort, adventure, beauty, significance, and a few other core desires that a new home, or anything else on this planet, can never fulfill.

It’s impossible to want the stuff of fame, for example, without an underlying desire to feel good about onesself, like I matter so much that millions of people saw my Sunday morning post and shared it with their friends. God may not have given me the desire for a huge fan club, but I’m certain that He gave me the desire for weight, significance, dast we say “glory.” Whatever desire might spin off of that is my creation, usually a corrupted version of what lies beneath.

Same thing goes for my favorite sins; lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, pride, etc. None of those happen without desire. Sin doesn’t have some brand of faithlessness or unspirituality at it’s core, that idea doesn’t go deep enough. Sure, we’re forced to ignore the rules of a good life when we choose to do wrong, but that’s simply the “permission” step of sinning. What drives it all are the impossible wants that are swirling around in our soul every hour of every day.

Our pastors and teachers tell us that we’ll sin less if we “desire God” above all things – a good Christian only has a single want. But that doesn’t go deep enough, either. I believe, as Origen did, that we all live with a desire for God, but that’s far from our only want.

As such, we’re forced to ask where these core desires come from. Who authored them? Again, I’m not referring to all of the corrupted, Elsa-boot versions of our deeper desires; the impressive paycheck, the stunning physique, etc. I’m referring to the bedrock stuff underneath.

Humanity, all of it/us, has this in common: the stuff we’re digging for has the exact same desires at its core: significance, beauty, intimacy, comfort, pleasure, justice, adventure, joy, laughter, discovery – all as universal to us as hands and feet. There is no culture in human history that doesn’t have your core desires running nearly the entire show.

We might express (and contaminate) these in different ways, but if you dig a little deeper, you’ll see that we all want the same thing(s).

How? It can’t be evolution, there’s no evidence from archaeology/anthropology that might lead us to believe that human desire has evolved into what it is today. There’s nothing that keeps me from assuming that things common to all of us have always been here, and might just be part of a bigger design.

As such, I’m comfortable lobbing the proposition that our core desires came straight from God; they are authored by him, intended to be as much a part of our life in the here and now as all the other things we confess to be “eternal.” If we’re created “in the image of God,” bearing within our soul and maybe on our face some representation of His values, abilities, agendas, and, for this discussion, desires, we’re forced to consider the idea that our core desires are His, and will echo into eternity.

Blueprints

Because of the pain that desire causes, and because our culture of faith paints desire as an unsavory proposition of sorts, I’m tempted to repress, to act like it doesn’t exist. Understandably, whenever I think of what the afterlife might look like, I imagine something that nobody could look forward to, failing to understand that looking forward to heaven is mission-critical for anyone hoping to follow Jesus into the broken places of our world.

But to many of us modern Christians, it’s all a bit of a joke. We’d never admit that, but our thoughts about heaven aren’t compelling enough to affect our day-to-day life. If our current predicament is such an affront to our deepest desires, doesn’t it stand to reason that our view of heaven will be an eternal extension of the same? We don’t want to be let down, and we certainly don’t want to commit the sin of selfishness, so we play the safe, benign, boring card and picture a great cathedral where we sit in a pew and sing.

Forever.

Worse, instead of dreaming about a future crafted by the God who loves unconditionally, and who can do whatever It wants – including but not limited to the unbridling of significance, beauty, intimacy, comfort, pleasure, justice, adventure, yada, yada – we limit our dreams to the here and now, and all of the cheap plastic nonsense within.

Boring. That’s not what lives within us.

If I exegete everything that God has authored, especially bible, humanity, and cosmos, I’m forced to conclude that human desire is here to stay. It’s just as permanent as we are, and it comes compliments of our creator. So is it theologically sound to at least give our desires some authority as we consider the content and character of whatever’s coming next?

Are our core desires the blueprints of heaven?

Will there be beach vacations and awesome sex and mansions resting on a cliff overlooing the wine dark sea and parties where everyone screams our name when we walk in the door? Maybe – who can say what an overthrown deity, the one who made us want, will put under the tree?

Regardless, we have to assume that our core, impossible-to-live-with desires will finally have a place to roam freely. No fences. We’ll no longer experience joy’s end, or wonder if beauty will come out for an encore. We’ll forever be the child who can’t catch her breath at the first sight of all the presents on Christmas morning, or the soldier reunited with his loved ones after years of wondering if he’d ever make it home. Significance, intimacy, adventure, beauty, joy, laughter, excitement, anticipation, etc. will rule the day in a place tailor fit for our deepest desires, no longer a car that dies moments after we try to start it.

Through a Dim, Dirty Glass

St. Paul likened our current predicament to an unborn baby, safe and cozy inside its own reality, experiencing the hints and muffled sounds of ours, with no concept for what’s about to happen. He talked about the suffering and pain that humanity will experience as it’s spat out into the next thing, and how all the hosts of heaven are waiting in anticipation for our birth.

In this analogy, we are the baby, while, oddly, we have been charged with the care of the baby. Love, forgiveness, mercy, compassion, justice, truth, etc., all have significant effect, as do hatred, envy, injustice, marginalization, lies, violence, etc. As such, we can’t claim to love and care for God while ignoring the care of His most valuable possession. So it should surprise none of us that the majority of Jesus’ commandments call us into things that will make this pregnancy go much more smoothly:

• • “Turn the other cheek”
  • “Do not judge”
  • “Keep your word”
  • “Do not fear”
  • “Love your enemies”
  • “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
  • “Honor your mother and father.”
  • “Forgive others as you would hope to be forgiven by God.”
  • “Serve others.”
  • “When you throw a party, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind.”
  • “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
  • “Go to the ends of the earth and teach people to do all the things I’ve taught you to do.”
  • “If you love me, keep my commandments.”

In all of this I hear, “Take care of the baby.”

Rest assured that ours is a temporary arrangement; whatever’s next will be a fuller, brighter, heavier, much more intimate station. For now, we’ll have to be content with the hints and muffled sounds of heaven while we care deeply for each other, comforted and encouraged by hope in what the most powerful entity imaginable will do with the desires He’s placed within all of us.

For now, dream, big; so big that it affects your life. If it doesn’t, you’re not dreaming big enough. Maybe spend a little time thinking about the core desires underneath your preferred heaven, coming to grips with the part of you that’s been chained up for so long, adjusting your picture as you go. But whatever you do, dream.

Rest assured, whatever you come up with will be a poor representation of what will be, like a child hoping for a cheap plastic tiara under the tree who finds a pony in the backyard instead. There’s no way any of us can imagine what we’ll be spat into, but if our desires are any clue, it’ll be amazing, and more human than we dare imagine.