Some time at the start of July I came across a tweet of a young man who started the month in the hospital, he said his pregnant wife had suddenly collapsed and before he knew what was happening, an ambulance was in his house and she’d been put on oxygen to be transported to the hospital, he said he heard himself say “God please!” For the first time in his life.

He got to the hospital, pacing the waiting area while they tried to stabilise her and baby, and as he paced, he said all he could say over and over, was “God please!”

Nothing spectacular about that, until I read the end of the tweet. He said he doesn’t know where “God please” came from, he said he’d never been a Christian or religious, and they’d never identified as people of faith, but in that desperate instant, for whatever reason, his brain, heart and mouth decided to call on a God he didn’t even know or care to know before then.

His tweet wasn’t conclusive, it was pensive; for him and for we the readers and for whatever reason, it’s stayed in my heart all of July!

Even today, while washing my babies bottles, it came to my heart again and I immediately heard the scripture “He has set the human heart to eternity” ~ Ecclesiastes 3:11b

Eternity has often only been referenced when we speak about time, and fair enough, the Bible references it often in light of an endless time that is to come. But eternity as a word is coined from the adjective eternal, and eternal is a descriptive word often accorded to God, whether as “the everlasting God”, or “the ageless one” as some Africans will say, or even “the one who exists outside of time”.

Christians have such a varied way of declaring the timelessness of God, existing endlessly.

I’ve given up attempting to imagine what eternity really is. Outside of the conventional English definition, you could actually go crazy trying to imagine eternity in light of time.

This exact sublime character of eternity is why God has set our hearts to it, to Him. He’s the only synonym that can stand beside eternity in light of that scripture.

And for some, it’ll take the deepest of trenches, the darkest of valleys to recognise that heart setting, as in the case of this young man that has sat in my thoughts all month.

As I thought deeper about the scripture today, I realised that it is actually a defiance for our hearts to be set on anything other than God, whether consciously or unconsciously.

So while I prayed for the total arrest of this stranger, I remembered us, the ones who already proclaim Christ as king, asking God to help us keep our hearts setting right where He put it.

I felt a sort of comfort knowing that somewhere in every heart is a setting that has been preset by heaven, and we will all realise it, hopefully sooner rather than later.