Eternity in the Human Heart

After writing yesterday's post about Ecclesiastes 3, I continued to consider it.  I took it to bed with me and read the whole chapter several times before falling asleep.  Each time the words that jarred me were that God "has set eternity in the human heart."  Today I did some research on this work.

King Solomon, whose very name has come to be synonymous with "wisdom," is believed to have written these passages.  The son of King David, Solomon had fallen into, shall we say, bad habits of every stripe, and after wrestling with his conscience to find a higher Truth, he is believed to have settled into the observation that the only true happiness can be found in God.  No true happiness was to be found in all the distractors he had chased; it was only to be found in God.

I am certainly not one to say that I want to challenge the wisdom of Solomon, and I agree with what Solomon was saying. AND, I also believe that spiritual writings of every genesis are intended to guide our own spiritual discovery and growth--to find what is true in our own hearts.  Accordingly, I believe that they are not intended to tell us an answer, but to point us toward the questions that we should explore. 

The question that kept coming to me from this passage was "What does it mean that eternity has been set in the human heart?"  I looked up eternity: "the afterlife, everlasting life, life after death, the hereafter, the afterworld, the next world."  In a word: heaven. All set in the human heart.  Wow...and...I am sure it is true.

I have written before in this blog that I believe God exists in our hearts and what connects us--everyone of us--is God--one heart to another to another...all connected as One.  In those moments when I have felt keenly connected to All That Is, I feel it in my heart.  When I chose the name for this blog, I did so because I know in my heart that if I listen carefully to my heart, I am listening to God.  I believe that is true for each of us.  When we listen to our hearts, we are listening to eternity, set in the human heart.

I was also certain when I chose the name for this blog that it was about intention--the intention to live the best possible life.  If listening to heaven isn't it, I am not sure where we would turn for answers.  That is what Solomon seems to be telling us.  He has searched for answers everywhere and in everything, and the answer is in set in the human heart--yours and mine.