News From a Country Never Visited

Maybe it’s the sound of my boots walking down the sidewalk in Riverside. Maybe it’s the feeling you get when the night has just begun yet it feels later than it really is because the clouds reflect back the city lights. Maybe it’s the cool air still holding on to winter’s chill. Whatever it is, I’m not sure.

‘Nostalgia’ is the word we toss out to describe the feeling… but it’s so cheap to describe the depth of that feeling with one word. That feeling that you love to have and hate to have at the same time; the one that makes you want to sit and drink a glass of wine alone.

It’s not a trifle feeling like laughing at a joke, or simple sarcasm, it’s much more. Yearning for the future and the past, reality and immaterial all at once. C.S. Lewis says it like this, “For they are not the thing itself; they are only 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 visited.”

Indeed these things are suggestions of much more, namely the depth of this singular feeling suggesting there is more than this visible stuff to reality. For there is somberness to this feeling, one that makes the young feel old.

Maybe it’s just the sound of my boots walking down the sidewalk, or maybe it’s the subtle suggestion that ripples through the physical whispering of a greater reality; a call that beckons us to more than fleshly lust and games. A call that will change everything.