Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, a 7-Year-Old’s Dreams, and a Glimpse of Heaven

It was lunchtime. I was sitting in my 2^nd grade classroom eating from my Snoopy lunchbox. I was only 7 years old. I was with one of my best friends. In my lunch that day I was fortunate to have a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. 

It was amazing.

In that moment, my friend Mike and I dreamt of the future. I told him that someday I wanted to be so rich that I could eat Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups every single day. I would have them all over my house. I would just be constantly eating them. My greatest aspiration was to be able to eat Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups constantly. 

I still love Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. They truly are amazing. I especially love the various holiday ones. I think they have a bit more of a peanut butter to chocolate ratio? 

So, how have I done in life? The good news is that I can now afford to be able to buy as many Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups as I would like. I could indeed fill my entire house with containers of them. No one would stop me from having a peanut butter cup breakfast, a peanut butter cup lunch and a peanut butter cup dinner. I don’t do that, of course. 

But to a 7-year-old sitting in lunch in the 2^nd grade, that was the ultimate dream. 

Why do I tell this story? 

In this world there are Reese’s cup eating moments. They are truly wonderful. The only problem is that these moments do not last. I could try to just sustain them all the time. This seemed to be the answer to 7-year-old me. I could become a Reese’s cup addict. I could just eat them all the time until it takes over my life and my health. 

But even if I tried this it would not satisfy me.  

That is the problem with these moments. No matter how good they are, they do not last and cannot be sustained. And efforts to try to sustain them generally are not only ineffective but destructive.

Nonetheless, we get glimpses of really good things in this world. They are but a moment and then we get pulled back to other things. Most of the other things are mundane. Some are painful. This world and this life are not just Reese’s cup moments. There is a lot more to it. It does involve times of eating bran, oatmeal or even spinach. Sometimes it is having to swallow nasty tasting medicines.

But what about those Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup moments? 

C.S. Lewis talked about something that he called, “joy.” He used the word “joy” for lack of any other word to describe something entirely unique. He described this “joy” as the experience “of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction”.^[1] These were, he thought, glimpses of the eternal. What he talked about was of course much more complex than eating a Reese’s cup. Lewis himself explains that “Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing”.^[2]

It is the idea that within this life we get glimpses of things that are amazing and filled with glory and wonder, but then which leave us yearning for more. There is in this life a sense of the incomplete.

It may be in the experience of the love of another person. It could be in the glory of music. You can feel it in the glory of a sunset. The beauty is intense. You do not know what to do with it. It makes you feel like you should somehow hold onto it but then it is gone.

Lewis was truly a thinker. He became an atheist at the age of 15. Later in life, as he honestly sought to understand himself and this world, he noted a sense that there were deeper mysteries than the obvious realities of the physical world in front of him. Deep within him was a real and mystical longing for something more. These experiences of “joy” were to him secret clues to a deeper understanding of human existence. They were a linking back to his very creation and to one who created all things and who has known him (and each of us) “before the creation of the world.”^[3] In this sense of “joy”, if Lewis truly was going to insist on being honest with himself, was a challenge to his long-held atheist beliefs. C.S. Lewis eventually came to faith as a Christian. To his rational mind the Christian faith was the only thing that ultimately made sense.

When we marvel and enjoy a beautiful sunset, the light passing through brightly colored autumn leaves, the wonder of a moving piece of music, the love of another person, or the joy of the taste of a Reese’s cup, we are experiencing a bit of how God created us to be. He wanted us to enjoy His creation. More than that, He wanted us to enjoy Him in His glory and wonder.

Someday He will restore us and all of His creation. That He has promised. He has a plan in place to do that. The Scriptures teach the story that starts with creation, detours off through sin, brokenness and separation and then the path back to restoration through Christ.

But for now, we see glimpses of what God’s real plan for us was and is. These glimpses come and go.

C.S. Lewis captures some interesting ideas well in his book, “The Last Battle.” This is the last in his series of books about the “Chronicles of Narnia.” In that book his characters reach the new heaven and the new earth. In that story, however, heaven is not a bunch of people floating on clouds in long white gowns. It is instead lush grass and hills and trees. The place is familiar. They see the home, the places, and the people that they have loved in this life, but they are better. They are perfected – or better described – they are as they were intended to be rather than in the flawed (good mixed with bad) manner that we experience them now. 

Imagine getting to heaven and finding it to be like your home town, or your favorite places to go, or places where you often had glimpses of “joy”.

His characters can feel the grass and run through the fields with joy. They run “farther up and further in” and as they do, they experience more and more of the things that meant so much to them in life, but which are now “better.”

“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.”^[4]

They then find, greet and experience one after another of their dear old friends and family that had gone on before them.  As they do, it is described:  

“And there was greeting and kissing and handshaking and old jokes revived, (you’ve no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years)…”^[5]

Aslan, the lion then explains:

“The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”

“And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

Recently my father passed away. In working through my grief, memories of him keep coming to mind. As a child I remember how he and my grandfather would talk on and on. Some days as we finished working on the farm I thought they would never finish talking. We would be waiting to go home to dinner (or “supper” on the farm). Often I would give up on them and plop down on the grass of my grandparent’s lawn waiting for them to finish talking. Recently my mother told me that she was imagining my Dad greeting my grandfather and the two of them talking and talking again. In my mind I saw them by the picnic table and then walking together through the farm as they talked. Down the lane, up the hill and through the grass, looking over the orchards. “Farther up and further in!” 

Today I had a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. It was delicious. As I savored it I remembered.  A 7-year-old me was sitting with his friend Mike and eating a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. He was enjoying every minute of it and not worrying about the calories or whether he ought to be eating it. 

It was a glimpse of the eternal, wrapped up in a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.

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^[1]  C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, pp. 17–18.

^[2] C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, p. 72.

^[3] Ephesians 1:4

^[4] Excerpt From: C. S. Lewis. “The Chronicles of Narnia.” Apple Books. https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-chronicles-of-narnia/id1509784076

^[5] My father had a great sense of humor. He loved his “Dad jokes.” https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/90599897/posts/3032127408