Anyone in our world who devotes his whole life to seeking heaven will be like Reepicheep. (CS Lewis, Letters to Children)

In the CS Lewis fantasy The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when presented with an opportunity to enjoy a daily king’s feast and stay back from the risk and peril of continuing on to the “World’s End,”  Reepicheep replies:

“My own plans are made.  While I can, I sail east in the Dawn Treader. when she fails me, I paddle  east in my coracle. When she sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws.  And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan’s country, or shot over the edge of the world in some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise…. “

Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. But most of us find it very difficult to want “heaven” at all… (CS Lewis Mere Christianity  120)

Reepicheep…  Small of stature, yet pure in heart.   He was BIG!   His valiant love for God and passion for heaven made up for his smallness.  At the end of the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when he saw Aslan’s country in view, he “bade them good-bye, trying to be sad for their sakes; but he was quivering with happiness. ” (CS Lewis, The voyage of the dawn treader.)

Our view of the future will absolutely condition how one lives in the present… Those who have a definite future and see it with clarity live in the present with radically altered values as to what counts and what does not. (Gordon Fee, NICNT I Corinthians 7.29ff))

They do not know the first rule of the holy game, which is that every player must by all means touch the ball and then immediately pass it on. To be found with it in your hand is a fault: to cling to it, death. But when it flies to and fro among the players too swift for eye to follow, and the great master Himself leads the revelry, giving Himself eternally to His creatures in the generation, and back to Himself in the sacrifice, of the Word, then indeed the eternal dance “makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.” CS Lewis, The Problem of Pain, page 137

May our lives in this new year be transformed by a clearer view of heaven and a God who demonstrated for us that Joy was the result of giving it all away … and a little more like Reepicheep!

Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in. (CS Lewis, Mere Christianity p 191)