He Set Eternity in our Hearts

Sorry this post is coming so late in the week. For some reason I really had trouble coming up with something to talk about, especially amidst the busyness of lectures, etc.

I decided to talk about something that came up more than once in my week in really subtle ways, but that I think is really interesting and important. Admittedly, I need to think a lot more about this complex subject.

Ecclesiastes 3:10-11
"I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end."

Think about that while I tell you these two stories from my week:

One.

I'm very blessed to be able to have lots of conversations about God with people who don't necessarily believe in him or care about what he has to say. In my field, almost everyone is an atheist, but they are generally very interested in my alternative perspective. Recently, during one of these conversations, a colleague of mine asked me a question that she feared was too personal. "Do you really, actually, deep down inside, feel that there is something more?"

That was a weird question for me. People don't usually approach my faith in terms of my feelings about it. I don't usually approach my faith in terms of my feelings about it. But then I realized that the answer to her question was "Absolutely yes, I know there is something more. I can feel it inside of me." I really don't think I had ever said that to a person before, because I focus a lot on intellectually coming to God. But I realized as I answered her, that another way that I believe in God is because I know in my heart that he is the explanation for things. I'm the kind of person who likes to know things only with my brain, but there is something to be said for feeling in your heart that there is something more to life than what you can come up with in your own brain.

After all, that's exactly the premise of Ecc 3:11. God set eternity in our hearts, not so that we can understand all of the things that God has done or what God understands, but so we can understand that there is something more. Like I said, I need to think about that verse and what it means more, but there seemed to be a strong correlation between what my colleague was referencing in my "gut feelings" and the idea of God "setting eternity in our hearts." Whether or not she believed in something more, she was willing to recognize that my belief (especially in life after death) would be something that stemmed at least in part from an internal instinct of some sort.

Now for story number two. This isn't really my story as much as the other one was. I started watching this documentary called "Surviving Progress" on Netflix. I've been busy, so I've only watched about 15 minutes of it. During this fifteen minutes, a evolutionary scientist (I think that was his title) was explaining the differences and similarities between chimps and humans. The major difference he brought out was that when something doesn't work how it is supposed to for a chimp, they just keep trying to do whatever it is and they don't understand why it doesn't work. Alternatively, if something doesn't work in the way that a human expects it to based on prior knowledge, they look for an unobservable factor that could be causing this different outcome.

The scientist, of course, gave no explanation as to why humans, rather than chimps, are capable of understanding that there could be invisible/unobservable things that explain life. Those are his words, not mine. He stated very plainly that humans are looking for unobservable things to explain life, not just individual events.

So here it was again, Ecclesiastes 3:11 from the mouth of a scientist. Humans are seeking explanations that go beyond our senses. What the scientist didn't say, but that I will, is that our Creator gave us that longing to help us search for him.

I don't know if there is anything that one could make of that searching, that longing, or that "gut feeling" without the Creator. If there is just nothing else--no more to this life (or beyond this life)--why is there this pervasive idea that we are looking for something that we naturally perceive inside ourselves?

(Now that I'm reading this, I'm realizing that these ideas are probably also informed in part by C.S. Lewis and his discussion of the Law of Human Nature in Mere Christianity. Regardless, I take comfort and hope in the fact that God gives us tools to help us search for him and find him. And I hope that we can all be aware of those around us who are looking and feeling so that we can help guide them to the true God.)