I see your trips to Cinque Terre and Iceland. I’ve noted the National Parks you’ve visited and hearted the hikes you’ve logged on All Trails. I gladly favorite them and add them to my bucket list, as a fan of dreaming; however, I also see the danger lurking under our wanderlust.

The Good God who created us out of wholeness and wired us for fullness set eternity in our hearts (Genesis 1: 26–27; Ecclesiastes 3: 11). The more we know about the complexity of our brains, the more honestly we can say that we are wired for and by desire. Desire is intended to be a homing device that constantly reorients us to the God who alone can satisfy the deepest desires of the human heart. As C.S. Lewis so aptly wrote a century ago, “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.”

But here is the deal. I know that quote. And I still keep adding experiences to my bucket list thinking that some combination of them will satisfy me. My children do it, too. As soon as we finish one trip (the result of much saving, skimping, planning, and praying, I might add), they immediately remark, “I want to go to such and such next.” They are still young enough to vocalize externally what I am thinking in my heart internally.

Spoken vs. Lived Eschatology

Bucket lists, in and of themselves, are not bad. However, the weight we put upon them reveals our lived eschatology. Even if we don’t know what eschatology means, we live out of some vision of the end or purpose to which all things are moving. Our present culture of YOLO is living out its eschatology: if this life is all there is, we better get going on experiencing all we can now. The shorter the timeline, the more burdensome the bucket list. Thus, the lists of places we want to visit or restaurants in which we want to dine move from benign to cancerous quickly.

When the timeline is shortened, the stress increases and the contentment decreases. We become frantic chasers of pleasure, but we all know that pleasure does not make a great end. Even honest secularists realize that the more we chase pleasure, the more it eludes us. Long before the internet enabled us to peer into the pursuits of our pleasure-seeking peers, John Stuart Mill understood the futility of a life built around pleasure seeking:

“Those are only happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness: on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming at something else, they find happiness by the way.” 

Christians fix their aim on nearness to Christ which leads to Christ-likeness. Knowing the nature of their Good Father, they anticipate pleasure but don’t place it at the center of their existence.

A Better Bucket List

There are scores of spots I want to visit with my family. There are a hundred coffee shops I’d love to see and savor with my husband. I don’t want to lessen our desires, but I do want to rightly lengthen our timeline.

I want to encourage desire and longing and dreaming, but I also know our budget. I know the call laid upon our lives that constrains us to particular places and people when wanderlust would drag us away. I am growing in having realistic expectations on what we will and won’t be able to pull off this side of glory.

Thus, the eternal bucket list was born. At bedtime, sometimes my youngest son and I dream of the places we will visit together in glory. We have plans to meet up at the Great Wall of China (or its nearest replacement) in glory. We have plans to visit the Amazon (sans snakes and bug bites, which I am fairly certain won’t exist in glory). It began as a little game, but it has grown into a spiritual stretching session. If we really believe our eschatology, we have a long timeline to live out our deepest dreams.

In an effort to try to train my own heart to live in light of my eschatology, I have tweaked bucket lists to include two buckets. Imagine a small bucket with a larger bucket suspended underneath it. The first bucket is the “In this life” bucket, the second is the “In the endless life to come” bucket. We can make our lists, but we need not live in tyranny under them. What does not get done and what is not seen in our short days on this side of glory can simply be entrusted to the bigger, better bucket list.

As believers, we stake our hope on the reality that we have eternal days of soul-security and tangible, embodied delights set before us. We are not merely mortal. Christ came and died a terrible death to set such a glorious timeline before us. Apart from his redemptive work, we would be moving toward eternal separation from God (and no amount of bucket list experiences on this earth can alleviate such devastation). Yet, in Christ, we have “strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow.”

In glory, wonder at Christ will cure us of wanderlust. Adventure, travel, and beauty will certainly be present, but they will be set in right priority. Without our sin, we will enjoy eternal pleasures without enthroning them. Until then, we need to be wise with our bucket lists. May our longings lead us all the way home!