reading excerpts

Excerpts from The Prodigal God by Timothy Keller...

speaking of beauty and longing:
    Our life-long nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. (C.S. Lewis)
    ...We are told there that we were created to live in the garden of God.  That was the world we were built for, a place in which there was no parting from love, no decay or disease.  It was all these things because it was life before the face of God, in his presence.  There we were to adore and serve his infinite majesty, and to know, enjoy and reflect his infinite beauty.  That was our orignial home, the true country we were made for.
  

regarding the truth that both the self-discovery/self-actualization/humanistic way (the younger brother) and the moralistic/works-based/pharasaical way (the older brother) are dead ends -and that the Way is through Jesus, these verses:

On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare
     a feast of righ food for all peoples,
     a banquet of aged wine -
     the best of meats and the finest of wines.
On this mountain he will destroy
     the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
     the sheet that covers all nations;
     he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears from all faces;
     he will remove the disgrace of his people
     from all the earth.
The LORD has spoken.  (Isaiah 25:6-8)