Your eyes open. Fresh light from a new sun breaks through your window and falls across your face. You breathe deeply and suddenly feel the possibility that lays in the coming hours, right outside your door. It’s a feeling of hope, a feeling of desire— one that pulls you out of bed and into the unknown, because maybe just maybe today will be your day, week, month, year. This feeling, this desire for something new and beautiful, even in the midst of an unknown future and chaotic world is woven deeply in the very heart of every human.

This feeling of hope, while universal, is also ludicrous. We live in a broken world full of unrealized dreams, broken hearts, and crushing monotony that makes hoping seem silly or even dangerous. One glance at the world around us or even the world inside us can often bring us to the depressing realization that maybe this hope is foolish. Yet still it remains. Hope lives in us even when we are given no evidence it has any use and often seems to only bring about painful disappointment and bitterness.

Throughout the ages deep thinkers, philosophers, theologians, and podcast hosts have grappled with this problem, trying to reconcile our desire for future goodness, with the reality of a continually broken world. Philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer suggested the answer to this human problem is to rid yourself of desire, concluding that the source of pain lays in us wanting and being disappointed when those wants aren’t fulfilled. And perhaps he’s right, maybe we would be happier if we stopped hoping and desiring. But the problem is, thus far I’ve met no one, even the most bitter curmudgeon, who has been able to rid themselves of desire.

Following this line of thought came the existential nihilists like Frederich Nietzsche, who postulated that rather than getting rid of our desire we should simply accept with stalwart resolve the depressing reality of existence being meaningless and simply set our minds to becoming stronger so we may withstand the crushing weight of a purposeless life.

Then we arrive in modernity where a new solution to the problem of hope has been found and is practiced ad nauseam. It takes bits and pieces from many old philosophies but blends them together in an entirely unique way resulting in a modern philosophy I call existential-distractinism where to deal with our deep and unrealized human desires we simply distract ourselves. Using social media, TV-shows, constant work, self-help novels, political activism, fast food, and overworking as ways to deflect our deeper longings we dare not slow down long enough to acknowledge lest all our depression, fears, hurt, sadness, and hopelessness catch up with us. And this has worked for a while, but I’m starting to notice loose threads in its longevity. Constant distraction takes work and effort, and we are growing weary from running. One can only live with unsatiated hunger so long before keeling over from fatigue. This reality is evidenced by multiple studies showing that even in a world with more comfort, entertainment, connection, technology, food, money, and information, depression and suicide continue rise each passing year.

So here we are, hundreds of years of philosophy and advancement in every way and yet no closer to dealing with this nagging desire and hope it seems we’ve been plagued with. So what are we to do? The best minds and great technological achievements haven’t helped at either filling our desire nor getting rid of it. Are we to continue to live with this unbearable ache for which there’s no cure?

Maybe… or maybe we were actually meant, intended to have this longing. Maybe it’s not a bug, but actually a design feature, programmed in us bu an intelligent designer who endowed us with want so we could be actually filled.

The great 20th century theologian, novelist, and philosopher C.S. Lewis had another idea about what to do with the desire and what it might be trying to tell us. In his famous book Mere Christianity he wrote this:

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

These words are so startlingly simple, but maybe just maybe in them is the answer to the age long question. Maybe we were made to desire, and our problem isn’t us desiring too much, but instead, too little. Perhaps the want was meant to be there, and perhaps it is the one thing that will draw us into another world where all this longing will finally be fulfilled. This this way of looking at life and human desire is nothing new, it’s the one that a few souls have captured and held onto for dear life since the beginning of recorded history. And it’s the one that even on my dark days in a broken world gets me up in the morning.

Yes I know this sounds too good to be true— there being answer to all our long held hopes. Especially when it’s found in an unseen realm created by a frustratingly hard to see God. I get that, I really do. Perhaps I’m a fool for believing that I (all of us) matter and there’s an answer to this seemingly unquenchable longing. But regardless of whether it’s true or not, simply believing it has changed my life and allows me to live each and every one of my days with an eternal perspective that gives me hope foe the future and strength for the present.

Maybe my belief is wrong. Maybe it’s just a nice dream to believe and there ultimately is no answer to all our our longings, hopes, and desires. But ask yourself, why do we have this want built into us to begin with could this desire for more possibly be telling us something true about reality and ourselves?

I, for one, believe it is…