I have a memory that has stayed with me for most of my life. A memory of a particular afternoon. I’m not entirely sure why it has persisted in my mind with such a dogged determination for nearly 30 years now. I’m not sure why this afternoon, of all the thousands that constituted my childhood has lodged itself so permanently within me. And yet, it has. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that this is a very important thing.

I am somewhere around 9 or 10 years old. I’m in my bedroom. It’s spring break and I’m off from school. The world outside my open windows is doing what it so often seems to have done in the past, and, interestingly, what it so rarely seems to do in the present – being absolutely, uncomplicatedly beautiful. The gentle breeze that’s wafting in carries a quality of something cool and sweet, that tastes faintly as though the world outside has just recalled something it had forgotten all winter. The light that fills my room is bright and generous and warm. I am playing a basketball game on my Nintendo. There’s a stereo system on the dresser, and DC Talk’s “In the Light” fills the room with sound. I couldn’t have known it then, but even the very lyrics of that song were informing the moment that was developing, offering so much more than mere entertainment.

And in that moment, out of all the goodness and light and cool air and music and comfort and pleasure, a feeling blossomed to life. A feeling so pronounced, so deeply impactful, that I spent years afterward reflecting and trying to name it. It wasn’t a feeling of anything missing. Quite the opposite, in fact. That afternoon was nearly as perfect as an afternoon could be by every measurable metric available to a 10 year old boy. And yet…

And yet there was something, not missing from it, but something in it. Or better yet, just beyond it. Something present but out of reach, much like the tinkling of a distant sound drifting through an open door. Just beyond the music, just past the edge of that clean, spring air there was something I could almost touch – but not quite. Something I could almost hear. Something that the moment itself seemed to be leading toward without ever arriving at. It was like a longing – which is the only word I’ve found that comes close to describing it – but a longing for what I could not have told you. Certainly not a longing for anything I had ever held or known. It was as if that moment had become a window into another world, and I was pressing my face against it, breath fogging the glass, straining to see what lay on the other side, desperately aching to get to it, but unable even to name it.

That afternoon passed, just like all afternoons do. The game eventually grew boring, the radio broadcast moved on, the bright afternoon dissolved into twilight. But that longing ache did not dissolve along with it. It followed me into adulthood. I would reminisce on it every so often. I spent years wishing I had the vocabulary large enough to capture it. The feeling from that moment surfaced in other moments too; not many, but just as palpable, especially in hindsight. It was always the same, like I was reaching for some unreachable thing.

I tried, over the years, to explain that feeling to people sometimes. It never went particularly well. The words available to me always seemed to be too domesticated for the thing I was trying to explain. I would reference longing, and people would nod politely, assuming they understood, and I would know that they were picturing something far more manageable than what I meant. I would try ache, and that seemed closer perhaps, but still not quite right. Someone might suggest nostalgia, and I could accept the word only reluctantly, knowing it was wrong but having nothing better to offer. Nostalgia points backward, toward something you once had and lost. This was different. This was a longing for something I had never held, had never known, something I could not picture or describe. How do you explain a homesickness for a place you have never been?

Then, some years ago, I sat down with “The Weight of Glory,” the short, seminal essay by C.S. Lewis in his compendium volume by the same name. I had been told it was worth reading, and it was the kind of recommendation I had filed away in my mind and partially forgotten, the way we often do with things we intend to get to eventually. I am grateful I finally did, for I was only a couple of pages in when something happened that I was wholly unprepared for.

He named it.

Not with a tidy label, not with the kind of language that explains a thing by reducing it. He named it the way a poet names something, by describing it so very exactly, that the thing itself seems to form out of the shadows and stand in the light. He called it an inconsolable secret, this desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience, a longing we can neither hide nor fully explain. He wrote about the books and the music in which we thought this indelible beauty was located, but how they betray us when we trust them. How it was never really in them but only came through them. He wrote of this beauty as the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

When I read those words, I was suddenly ten years old again, sitting in that bedroom, the spring air moving through the open window, “In the Light” drifting from the radio, the afternoon as perfect as an afternoon can be, and that feeling, that unbearably sweet, reaching feeling, was right there with me again, as fresh and as unresolved as it had ever been. It was like greeting an old friend. Lewis had not simply described an experience I recognized. He had walked into a room I had been carrying around for decades, looked around quietly, and said, yes, this is real, and I know exactly what this is.

There is a particular kind of relief that arrives when someone finally names a thing you have carried wordlessly for years. But I noticed, while sitting with Lewis, that the relief was not uncomplicated. It was threaded through with something that felt almost like grief. Because naming it made the unattainableness of it all the more real. If others felt this, if this was not a private eccentricity of my own interior life but something woven into the fabric of what it means to be human, then I could not brush it away. I could not file it under nostalgia or romanticism or the sentimental tendencies of a boy who felt things too deeply. This was not a malfunction. This was a signal. And signals, by their nature, point somewhere.

The question Lewis pressed me toward is this: what is it pointing to?

The question deserves an honest answer, and I think the honest answer is both simpler and more staggering than we might expect. The longing points to God. Not at a better version of this world, not at some future arrangement of earthly circumstances that will finally satisfy the ache, but at God himself, and at the life that is fully and finally found in him alone.

But here is what I want to sit with for a moment, because I think it matters: the longing is not a mistake. It is not a symptom of spiritual immaturity, or some youthful malady that deeper faith will eventually cure. It is not depression dressed in theological garb, or the residue of a sensitive personality. God did not wire us with this ache accidentally, or carelessly. He wired us with it deliberately, just as a compass is built with a needle already oriented to the north. I did not choose to feel it. It arrived before I had categories for it. Before I had studied theology, before I had read Lewis, before I had any language for it whatsoever. A boy in his bedroom on a spring afternoon, with no framework for what was happening inside him, felt it anyway. Because it was already there. Because it has always been there, in every human heart that has ever beaten, pressing up against every near-perfect moment, whispering that this, as good as this is, is not enough.

So what do we do with it? I don’t think we press it into things that cannot hold it, and I don’t think we suppress it or explain it away. I think we learn to receive it for what it is: grace, arriving in the form of an ache. Perhaps every moment of genuine beauty that opens this longing in us is, in actuality, God refusing to let us settle. Refusing to let this world be enough for us. Holding the door of our hearts just slightly ajar, so that the draft from somewhere else keeps moving through. This longing is not a malfunction. It is perhaps one of the most beautiful things about us: the part of us that has known all along, before we even had words for it, that we come from somewhere and are headed somewhere, and that the distance between here and there is precisely what you feel in your chest when the spring air moves through an open window and the music is exactly right and the afternoon is as good as it can be and somehow, somehow, it is still not enough.

That boy in his bedroom was not silly to feel it. He was, in that moment, feeling one of the truest things a human being can feel. All these years later, I am still caught off guard sometimes, to find myself feeling it again – delighting in an excellent cup of coffee, holding meaningful discussion with a dear friend, cradling a sleeping baby. I am learning to let it point me where it has always been pointing. To hold the beautiful things of this world with open hands – gratefully, joyfully, without clutching at them – knowing that they are not the destination but mere signposts. Knowing that the ache is not the end of the story.

The door, as Lewis puts it, will one day open.

And on the other side of it, I know, will be something that makes even the best spring afternoon feel like the trifles we were merely playing with all along. And we will rejoice, finally, with the joy of people who have arrived in the place they were always meant to be.