The puzzle maker's tears

What does matter, if it is less the task and the place than you thought, if you forget them the moment they leave your sight? It is the soul-being that stays with you every moment, that is a part of you, that you cannot escape. It is your longing and desire to feed your inner fire, your soul fire, what makes you more alive than you thought living could be.

I love horses, but I love life just as much. I want to live in a dozen countries and walk on a hundred beaches. I want to go and move and be and see, always moving. I wonder if that is selfish. It seems like it, sometimes. All about me, what I want.

Is it selfish? Is it selfish to follow who you are to the ends of the earth? Or is it more selfish, more self-focused, to say, “Who is God to have made me this way?” Yet, it is hard to not ask that. It is hard when you feel like two, three, so many different people in one, each seeming to be so desperately, cruelly different from the other. Couldn't you just be one person? Isn't that enough for anyone? But not for you, of course not. No, you look at that, and you sit and you journal and you pray and you stare out the window at the cold, blowing snow and you argue with the universe day after day after day. And you never seem to get anywhere. And meanwhile, life keeps on stepping quietly forward, oblivious of your trying to hold it back.

But God knows. Somehow, he knows. And he will make it right.

What if a puzzle piece laid alone, flat, even in perspective with the other pieces on the marked, rough-wood table, seeing only the colorless gray edges of the pieces beside it, catching mere glimpses, and said, “I must not fit, I cannot be used the way I am.” It changed itself and cut off parts of itself to conform to its far-reaching omniscient knowledge of what the puzzle needed. It cried, it felt so ugly changing itself, but, it knew, it had to be done.

And then, when the puzzle was finished, there was a hole in its heart, where the puzzle piece in its original, beautiful, created state, was supposed to have gone.

And the tears of the Puzzle Maker fell.

C.S. Lewis: Longing for beauty and searching for home

"What more, you may ask, do we want? … We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

“It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from.

“At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of the morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in the world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

~C.S. Lewis
The Weight of Glory