In Christianity, we like to talk about the joy of the Lord. We like to talk about the love of God, and we like to talk about the peace the Christ offers. Yet no matter how long I follow Jesus in this world, there is always a part of me that feels a sense of discontentment. Always.

This might cause you to squirm in your seat for a moment. And that’s okay.

I think that if you are honest with yourself, you might even know what I’m talking about. No matter how incredible the emotional or spiritual high, eventually you come back down to the ground. You are confronted once again with the darkness that is so pervasive and you are reminded that all is not right with our world. When this happens, I find, there is a piece of me that discovers this world feels less and less like a place to call home.

It seems as if God has placed a desire for the perfection of heaven within our hearts—an instinctive longing for an eternal place of belonging in a land we have yet to step foot upon. Scripturally, however, there is another way to look at it. We have been given a small piece of what is to come. The Message, talking about the Holy Spirit, paraphrases Ephesians 1:13–14, “This down payment from God is the first installment on what’s coming, a reminder that we’ll get everything God has planned for us, a praising and glorious life.”

In stark contrast to seeing all that’s not right in this world or in our hearts, the peace the Holy Spirit does in fact bring is just a foretaste, a down-payment, or a glimpse of what is to come. If our spiritual highs and mountaintop experiences can feel so good even when there is so much darkness in the world, imagine the peace we will experience when the Lord truly makes all things new!

Until Christ returns, no matter how much of an emotional frenzy we work ourselves into we will always come face to face with the reality that there is something in our world that is fundamentally broken and that has yet to be fully made right. But, my friends, that day is coming, and when we follow Jesus we are truly walking on the only path that leads to peace.

Until then, allow your discontentment to be a blessed reminder that, as the old song says, “This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through. My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue” (“This World is Not My Home,” attributed to A. P. Carter [1931] and arranged by Albert E. Brumley [1937]).