As Good as it Gets?
I enjoyed the movie "As Good As It Gets" with Jack Nicholson - it had some great one-liners including my favorite (which is very sexist)...Nicholson is approached by a young lady gushing over his writing ability. He can't stand interacting with people and being OCD, hates being stopped from what he is doing. This girl approaches him and says, "How do you do it? How do you capture women so easily? I am so moved by your writing and I feel like you understand me at a deep level no one has ever reached before. How do you do it?" Nicholson replies, "I take a man and remove reason and accountability".

That isn't the point of this post (but it is funny...to me). Eldredge talks about the subject of "As good as it gets" in his book Sacred Romance. He says, "If for all practical purposes we believe that this life is our best shot at happiness, if this is as good as it gets, we will live as desperate, demanding, and eventually despairing men and women."

AJ Conyers writes in The Eclipse of Heaven, "We live in a world no longer under heaven." All the crises of the human soul flows from there. All our addictions and depressions, the rage that simmers just beneath the surface of our Chrisitan facade, and the deadness that characterizes so much of our lives has a common root: We think this is as good as it gets. The best human life is unspeakably sad. Even if we manage to escape some of the bigger tragedies (and few of us do), life rarely matches our expectations. When we do get a taste of what we really long for, it never lasts. Every vacation eventually comes to an end. Friends move away. Our careers don't pan out. Sadly, we feel guilty about our disappointment, as though we ought to be more grateful.

Of course we are disappointed - we are made for so much more. "He has set eternity in our hearts." Eccl 3:11 Our longing for heaven whispers to us in our disappointments and screams through our agony.

CS Lewis wrote, "If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world."

So, what if this is "as good as it gets"? It probably is. Life on earth will never reach the "good" we are made for. That desperate longing we have is for another world we really cannot fathom. Reunited with our loved ones, lush pastures and lawns with no weeds, streets of gold, no more pain, no more tears, fruit trees that bloom and produce perfect fruit all the time, postcard sunsets every single evening, no more gossip, no more affairs, no more lust, no more pornography or rape or murder or crime, lean, muscular, perfectly healthy bodies with no more fat, friends that truly understand us and desire our company any time of the day and walking in lush gardens with our Lord any time we wish.

Now that is something to Soar! about...