Just as food is the prescription for hunger, air for our lungs, and love for our loneliness, heaven is the prescription for the craving of our spirits. But we often do not recognize our desire for pleasure as a longing for the joy of heaven, so we try to satisfy it with all kinds of earthbound pleasures. Yet no earthly pleasure can truly satisfy the longing. As the late British theologian Peter Toon explains, “The things for which men strive hardly ever turn out to be as satisfying as they expected, and in the rare cases in which they do, sooner or later they are snatched away.”28

Solomon’s book of Ecclesiastes is a journal of his attempt to find heaven on earth. It chronicles his pursuit of fulfillment through work and wealth and pleasure—only to find that only God could fill the void inside.

Mark Buchanan tells us that we need that empty spot at the center of our souls. God put it there as a homing device. If our bodies didn’t remind us to eat, we would starve to death. If our bodies forgot to breathe, we would suffocate. The spirit has its own craving, which works to keep our souls from withering inside us. God made us to be pursuers of something the earth can’t supply so that in the end we’ll look beyond earth. He set us up for disappointment here, in order that we may finally look for joy in the one place it can be found. “Yearning itself is healthy—a kind of compass inside us, pointing to True North,” writes Buchanan. “[God] put in me, in you, a homing device for Heaven. We just won’t settle for anything less.”29

There’s a reason that we feel nostalgia for the things of childhood, the particular aromas of our mothers’ cooking, the delight of the family Christmas tree, or the feeling of playing in the deep woods back behind the house. It’s because we are homesick for heaven as surely as we get homesick for our childhood homes. That emotional tug toward an earthly home is just an expression of a deeper tug toward the heavenly one; it’s just that we have no physical memory of what it is that we really want. Our spirits understand that it has to do with being a child, with being joyful, with being with a loving parent, with innocence and hope. It all points to our experiences in childhood, so we think we long to return to it. In truth, however, we want a more wonderful kind of childhood; a deeper joy; a perfect, profoundly more loving Parent, and a perfect innocence and fulfilled hope that this fallen earth can never provide.