Eternity in the hearts

I heard the most amazing thing on Vancouver Island this weekend. I was visiting my cousin and her family for the first time in four and a half years.

We were sitting around the lunch table today; myself, my cousin, her 7 year-old son and her 5 year-old daughter. Our lunch of burritos and, for some bizarre reason, red wine, was going along quite uneventfully until my cousin's first-born spoke up in a soft voice and said, "I'm scared that the world is never going to end."

This blew my mind. Out of the mouths of babes; isn't that the saying? I looked at my cousin with saucer eyes and whispered out the side of my mouth, "Keep him talking on this."

This conversation was mind blowing. My cousin kept asking him "why are you scared?" and he answered "Because that would be bad." "Why would it be bad?" was the follow-up question, and he answered back with variations of "because then the world would just keep going and never stop." Which, to this 7 year-old, was a scary thought. And not because he thought we'd be alive for that whole time. No, he was fully aware that even if the world never stopped we'd be dead anyway. We asked him if he thought that we wouldn't be able to go to heaven if the world never ended (something that, to the best of my knowledge, only the Jehovah's Witnesses believe). He didn't think that either. No, the world never ending was scary to this child for a reason entirely different, which he couldn't quite put a finger on. His circular reasoning continued for a few minutes longer, until he floored us with this one: In response to his mum's question about why he was scared he replied, "It would never end and we'd miss a whole bunch of things."

Isn't that mind blowing? A child scared that the world might NOT end? The guest preacher at the downtown Victoria church today spoke about how the moral law of the universe is written on our conciousness, and though the Scriptures are severely helpful, our conscience tells us pretty much all we need to know in order to be moral beings. But don't you think that some basic preliminary understanding of God's eschaton is written in our minds? Don't we all, on some basic level, know and expect that the world is going to end?

King Solomon certainly felt this way, which is why hearing Zachary say it 3000 years after these words were written is pretty trippy: "He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end." Ecclesiates 3:11 NIV

"He has also set eternity in the hearts of men". The foreknowledge of the eternal Kingdom of God, planted in our consciousness from the moment we entered this world. And three thousand years later, little Zachary is scared that the world might never end -- "because we'd miss a whole bunch of things."