We are honored to launch the new studio video for “I Know” from our friends, Kings Kaleidoscope, off their album Becoming Who We Are.

These lyrics pluck the strings of a deep ache inside each of us:

Every day at dawn I chase the sunrise,
Looking for a hint of Heaven’s light
I’ve been given a taste for something
That nothing in this world can satisfy

Every morning this thirst awakens in all of us. Every morning we hit “restart” on our chase for beauty and pleasure.

And yet the harsh truth is that no pleasure or beauty we have yet found in this world can bring our hearts final satisfaction. In fact, worldly pleasure and beauty only rip wider this inconsolable secret inside us.

“Inconsolable secret” is C.S. Lewis’s description of what beauty does to us. He means the sunrises, the sunsets, the new music, the great films, the wholesome jokes with friends, the long vacations on the beach, the Easter dinners with family, the passionate kisses from a spouse, the thrill of our hard work praised — all of these things naturally attract us, but they are never enough to fill us.

All these pleasures are images, writes Lewis. “The music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.”

We All Live with It

We mishandle this longing. We inevitably make the channel of our pleasure the object of our pleasure. We make idols that break our hearts and undermine our joy.

The idol of sex kills the relationship. The idol of materialism kills the pleasure of possessing. The idol of food kills the pleasure of health. The idol of money kills the pleasure of generosity.

We spend our lives trying to clamp down on one elusive object of our pleasure after another, not realizing this graveyard of idols is killing the one thing we so desperately want. Our quests for joy grow more deluded and delusional. We imagine if we have enough friends, have enough praise, have enough music, or have enough sex, those pleasures will satisfy this ache. They don’t, and they never will.

This is part of the inconsolable secret every one of us lives with.

The Déjà Vu Yet Unseen

So, Lewis writes, earthly pleasures “are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

In other words, he writes, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Yes, and of this cavernous desire, “earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage.”

Every pleasure in this world is pointing to another world. We live with a memory trace, a prompt that has been encrypted into our hearts, not recall from our past, but a memory of some future we have barely tasted, of a homeland we have never stepped into. Every pleasure is a déjà vu of something we have never seen, a longing so intense it breaks our hearts.

We are inconsolable . . . for now.

But I know that a time is coming
When I will be in glorious delight

I know.

I know because God is eager for me to know. He makes the pathway known and leads us to our home in his delightful presence (Psalm 16:11).

“Every pleasure is a déjà vu of something we have never seen, a longing so intense it breaks our hearts.”

I know the time is coming when I will see Jesus Christ face-to-face, and in that moment, every joy in this world — all the glimmers and glances, all the hints and echoes, all the shadows and whispers of pleasure — will crash together. Every shard of fragmented pleasure in this world will melt together and form one glorious whole, into a visible joy that is truly inexpressible and full of glory.

I know I will be fully and eternally satisfied in Christ alone — by his grace, his truth, his glory, and his beauty (1 John 3:2–3, John 1:14–16).

This is the moment of closure my inconsolable soul has ached for all along.

“I Know” is a track off Kings Kaleidoscope’s album, Becoming Who We Are (available now at iTunes and Amazon).