The Window on the World is our weekly opportunity to look at our world through the clear window of the Holy Scriptures. Usually, we try to understand some current event or contemporary issue from the standpoint of Christian theology. But occasionally we think about the affairs of everyday life. Tonight I want to talk about longing for happy days that will never return.

I had an unusual experience this summer–at least an unusual experience for me. I went through a a period of days, lasting maybe as long as a week, when I felt rather gloomy. It had something to do with the fact that I had work to finish during my vacation, but there was more to it than that.

I felt the way Alfred, Lord Tennyson, must have felt when he wrote his famous poem:

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are no more… .

Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

I was not quite as melancholy as Tennyson, but I was rather gloomy. It happened while we were visiting the home in which I grew up, 1118 North Howard Street in Wheaton, Illinois.

In some ways I felt like I was back in junior high. I know this because I kept calling my daughter, who is two years old, “Nancy” instead of “Kirsten.” Nancy, you see, is the name of my little sister, who is ten years younger than I am. Once I went back home, it seemed like the little girl in the house ought to be called “Nancy.”

My sister did not take kindly to this misuse of her name. For one thing, Nancy is now a married woman 21 years of age. For another thing, I usually called Kirsten “Nancy” when she was getting into trouble. My sister had trouble appreciating the logic of this, but it made perfectly good sense to me.

What made less sense to me was the other kid who was running around the house, my five-year old son Joshua. It was just like old times, a blonde-haired kid talking incessantly and playing with all my old toys, only it wasn’t me. It was Joshua building with my farm blocks, racing with my Hot Wheels®, setting up my electric football players, and carving up the lawn with my croquet mallets. He even slept in my old bedroom.

There was something about it that did not feel quite right. Josh was willing to share my toys with me, which was nice of him, but it is different when you are thirty years old. I was not happy.

Then I figured out the reason I felt so melancholy. I realized that I can’t go back. I will never be a child again. I will never get to spend lazy summer mornings playing baseball with Danny Blackwell. I will never be able to build the astronaut station with the special walkways. I will never get to run pass patterns for my dad in the front yard.

What I wanted to do was step inside Joshua and be five again, but life cannot be relived. It is not a videotape which can be rewound and replayed. Once the happy days are gone, they are gone forever. There is something sad about that.

You have probably felt the same way, from time to time. We cannot hold back the tides of time. Months, years, sometimes even decades pass before we know it. Some of the happy days are gone, gone forever. “Do not dwell on the past,” writes the prophet Isaiah (43:18b), but sometimes we still do. We can’t help it.

One man who sometimes lived in the past was Asaph. Asaph wrote nearly a dozen of the biblical psalms, and he was never afraid to say what was on his mind, even when it was going to end up in the Bible.

It seemed to Asaph as if his best days were behind him, “I was too troubled to speak,” he wrote. “I thought about the former days, the years of long ago; I remembered my songs in the night” (Ps. 77:4b-6a). Asaph was remembering the happy years when his nights were full of song. His memories filled him with sadness and made him wonder if the happy days would ever come again.

Asaph’s example gives us permission to talk to God about our longings and our regrets. But the Bible also warns us not to live in the past. We are not to look backwards, but forwards, to our eternal destiny. For those who know Jesus Christ, the best is yet to come.

In the book of Isaiah, God describes our happy future:

“Behold, I will create

new heavens and a new earth.

The former things will not be remembered,

nor will they come to mind.

But be glad and rejoice forever

in what I will create,

for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight

and its people a joy.

I will rejoice over Jerusalem

and take delight in my people;

the sound of weeping and of crying

will be heard in it no more” (Isa. 65:17-19).

Here, and elsewhere (Rev. 21:4), the Bible guarantees that there will be no more tears in heaven. Our days there will be so happy that it will be impossible for us to long for the former days. Among other things, the drying of our tears means that heaven is a place for the healing of memories, including painful ones. When Jesus Christ returns, all of our hurts, griefs, and longings will be swallowed up in joy.

The Bible does not explain how our memories will be healed. Perhaps God will give us the gift of forgetting, and our painful memories will utterly disappear. Or perhaps somehow our memories will be sanctified. The Bible does not say. But it does promise that there will be no tears in heaven, idle or otherwise. The best is yet to come. Yes, even the happy days will come again.