We were outside at night and, as we often enjoyed doing, looking up at the stars."Your life began in darkness," he said, "in the darkness of the womb. It was once all you knew, your entire life, your entire world. If you had been asked then to describe life, you would describe it as being dark, warm, and wet. And if someone tried to tell you that there was more to life, another life, another world, outside the womb, a world of stars and grass, of flowers and faces, of sand castles and setting suns, what would you have thought?"
"I guess I wouldn't have believed it. I wouldn't have been able to fathom it."
"But would there be a way that you could have known that this other life, this world beyond the womb, actually existed? What evidence would you have had within the womb of that which was beyond the womb?"
"I don't know."
"You," said the teacher. "You would be the evidence...you, dwelling in the darkness yet with eyes made to see color and light...with no ground to walk on, yet with feet made to run...with no air to breathe and yet with lungs made to breathe air and a voice box with which to speak into air...with no one's hand to hold, yet with two hands made to hold and be held by the hand of another. You yourself would be the evidence of the life beyond your life in the womb and the world beyond your world. Your very being was the evidence of a world yet to come, and yet you were surrounded by a much smaller world that was unable to answer what was within you."
"And this reveals..."
"When you hear of a world beyond this world and a life beyond this life, when you hear of heaven, you're hearing of it as a child in the womb. You've never seen it or touched it. And yet everything within you was made to know this world and live within it...a heart made for a love that is perfect and without condition, a soul yearning for that which is eternal, a spirit longing to dwell in a place of no death, no fear, no tears, no darkness, and no evil. And yet you live in a world of imperfection, of corruption, of pain and evil, of darkness and the absence of love. And as it was in the womb, so too this world can never answer the longings of your heart or the purpose for which you came into existence. And every tear, every sorrow, every disappointment, every unfulfilled longing is just a reminder that you're not home, and that you were made for something more, to be a child of heaven...and that this life is only the beginning of real life and the matrix of the world to come."
Take all the unfulfilled longings, needs, and desires of your life and turn them away from the worldly and to the heavenly.
Psalm 139:13-16 For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.
Romans 8:22 For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.
