Heaven's Fruit

First of all, to my approximately 2 regular readers, I'd like to apologize for missing a couple weeks. I have no excuse, I was just lazy. My only hope is that absence makes the heart grow fonder. To anyone else who may have stumbled upon, enjoy.
Whenever I eat a particularly juicy grape or sweet strawberry, I think of this paragraph from LB. It comes just after Tirian, the last King of Narnia, arrives in the New Narnia (heaven). He has just met the Seven Friends of Narnia and they all begin to explore together. (The Seven Friends of Narnia are everyone from our world who has visited Narnia, excluding Susan -- a topic for another post. They are Digory, Polly, Peter, Edmund, Lucy, Eustace and Jill.)

Not far away from them rose a grove of trees, thickly leaved, but under every leaf there peeped out the gold or faint yellow or purple or glowing red of fruits such as no one has seen in our world...What was the fruit like? Unfortunately no one can describe a taste. All I can say is that, compared with those fruits, the freshest grapefruit you've ever eaten was dull, and the juiciest orange was dry, and the most melting pear was hard and woody, and the sweetest wild strawberry was sour. And there were no seeds or stones, and no wasps. If you had once eaten that fruit, all the nicest things in this world would taste like medicines after it. But I can't describe it. You can't find out what it is like unless you can get to that country and taste it for yourself. 

I love this passage because it's one that sticks with you. That is, as I said before, I'm reminded of it every time I eat a really juicy and delicious fruit. And it reminds me that as good as it tastes, it's bland and dry in comparison with the fruit of heaven. Of course, I don't really know that there will be actual fruit in heaven, but this isn't really about fruit. It's that the greatest, simple and pure pleasures of this world and only a hint of what's to come for those who are in Christ.  Sometimes I wonder if everything we want or like in this world is only an ache for our true country. In Mere Christianity, Lewis said, 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."
In a letter to an elderly American woman who feared she was at the end of her life, Jack wrote these words: "Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind."
All too often, even though we know better, we live as if this world is our stopping point. As if we must try our best to be happy here, because when we die, all is over. Not so. This world, for all of us no matter our beliefs or actions, is only the beginning. "Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither." (The Great Divorce) If we live to gain earthly pleasures, being innocent or evil, we will be disappointed. It's like trying for the shadow of something rather than the thing itself. Or as Lewis said in The Weight of Glory "We are half-hearted creatures, fooling around with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."
If we can keep in mind that this world is not our final destination, but an important stop along the way, perhaps we will do the good we need to do instead of searching for fleeting pleasures. A lesson of which, believe me, I desperately need often reminded.