On Function, Worship, and Heaven

Been a while since I've posted (read 6 months). Thought I'd share something I've been working on. Work in progress:

Heaven will be a place where we are perpetually fulfilling our function. We will be full. Like a cup fulfilling its function, we will be full. Here, we experience fleeting moments where we truly feel like we are fulfilling our functions. We will have just finished a speech where we felt we provoked real thought in our audience; we will have had an intimate conversation with a friend that leaves us with a buzzing of happiness and purpose; or, we will have finished a large project that has been looming over our heads and be able to look at our completed masterpiece with complete satisfaction. Or, maybe we’re walking along the street and just look into the sky. We’re moved by its beauty and, in this moment of reverential awe, we feel a tremendous gratification. I intentionally give relatively mundane examples to illustrate how this fulfillment of function can exist outside of spiritual heights. God has made us to take supreme satisfaction in work well done — be it our own, others’, or His.

Worship is fulfillment of function. It is not exclusive to singing or praying or tithing or any number of other things traditionally defined as worship. God created us with a longing to feel function. We desire nothing more than a validation of our existence. This is why we are constantly seeking the approval of our peers. This is why we are so obsessed with success. This is why we need something to believe in and some ideal with which to identify ourselves. At the end of the day, we want to believe that we are important. We need religion because we desperately want to find something larger than ourselves that we can graft ourselves onto in an attempt to escape our own perceived insignificance.

Lewis referred to the fleeting moments of incomparable satisfaction as joy. In his autobiography, he credits these precise moments as the gateway to his salvation. These are flickers of divinity escaping the trap of apathy we’ve been cursed with.

Heaven will be made up of nothing but these moments. While they are elusive and fleeting here, heaven will be nothing but these moments stacked one on top of the other. And it will never end. Right when we would normally feel this wondrous feeling flee, it will make way for an even more exhilarating one. It will never end. Like a gushing geyser, our function will be positively replete with fulfillment to the point of exudation.

- BLAKE