The Thing You Want is Beyond the Thing

The Thing You Want is Beyond the Thing

Jeff Cavins

What is it that you're truly longing for? Today, Jeff explains why the things we want can’t be found in material things, and shares some resources on finding the true source of our desires.

Snippet of the Show

“Our capacity for grandeur and satisfaction is too big to stop with the things of this world.”

What We Really Want Can Be Found in God

“God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church. To accomplish this, when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son as Redeemer and Savior. In his Son and through him, he invites men to become, in the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life.” - CCC1

“Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away.” - C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.” - C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“It is generally allowed, that no man ever found the happiness of possession proportionate to that expectation which incited his desire and invigorated his pursuit; nor has any man found the evils of life so formidable in reality, as they were described to him by his own imagination; every species of distress brings with it some peculiar supports, some unforeseen means of resisting, or powers of enduring.” - Samuel Johnson

“All things that have every deeply possessed you should have been but hints of heaven – tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear…If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the more probable explanation is that I was made for another world…Earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.” - C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate.” - Genesis 3:6

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